


The Fire and the Rose

by imperatrixxx



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Angst, BDSM, Blood, Come for the Kylux stay for the scholarly footnotes, D/s, Depression, Dom/sub, Dom/sub Undertones, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, I'm Going to Hell, Inquisitor!Hux, Knight!Kylo Ren, Knights - Freeform, Leia is a Literal Saint, Lord/vassal Relationship, M/M, Medieval AU, Medieval Torture Devices, Misuse of JSTOR, Misuse of Saint Augustine, Misuse of an altar, Misuse of holy sacraments, Monk!Hux, Monks, PTSD, Roman Catholicism, Romance, S&M, Slow Burn, Smut, Song of Songs, Suicidal thoughts (brief), Torture, Virgin Hux, Wax Play, Whipping, dom!hux, sub!Kylo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-05-30 23:36:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 35,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6446731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imperatrixxx/pseuds/imperatrixxx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Armitage, abbot, inquisitor, and fanatical persecutor of heretics, has his life overturned when the enigmatic knight Kylo arrives at his monastery. He employs increasingly brutal methods to discipline the wayward brother, but is unprepared for Kylo’s responses and his own. Armitage finds his vows and cherished beliefs crumbling in the face of Kylo's submission. Threatened by the sinister Archbishop Snoke on one side and the heretical Church of the Force on the other, can their love survive?  (Kylux medieval AU.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pillars of Smoke

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me about medieval kylux at imperatrixxx.tumblr.com.

 

**And all shall be well and**

**All manner of thing shall be well**

**When the tongues of flames are in-folded**

**Into the crowned knot of fire**

**And the fire and the rose are one.**

**~T.S. Eliot, _Little Gidding_ (quoting Julian of Norwich, _14th Revelation_ )**

 

 

**“Who is this that comes out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke?” _~ Song of Solomon_ , 3:6.**

The chants of vespers wafted in through the open window as the day bled from the sky. The wet smack of knotted ropes biting into flesh was punctuated by ragged breaths and the gentle slap of the rising tide against the rocks below. On the stone floor, the pale sculptural body writhed as Father Armitage brought the cat o’ nine tails slashing down again and again. Candlelight licked over the planes and hollows of the prone man’s torso, haloing him in a soft golden glow. He looked like the painted wooden Christ that hung above the altar: stripped, abused, and transcendent. As a boy, Armitage had been taught to meditate on the beauty of that scarred divine flesh, to imagine – no, to experience – its suffering as his own. It was the same body that dissolved on his tongue at mass, that had died to purge him of his sins. Now the lattice of red stripes on white skin moved him to imagine a different kind of intimacy with the beaten flesh, as though he could feel the textures of the wounds and the raised skin beneath his fingertips, on his tongue. The air tasted of salt and iron.

“Enough,” he panted, lowering his aching arm. He picked up the bucket of brine and sloshed it over the man’s back. Kylo whimpered as the salt water cleansed his wounds. “Get dressed and go.”

Kylo rose from the floor in one sinuous movement. He shrugged the rough wool robes over his battered skin, and bowed, sweeping up the smaller man’s hand in his own. His large dark eyes were unreadable, but a trace of a beatific smile curved one side of his mouth. “Thank you, Father.” He placed a swift, dry kiss on the abbot's hand and slipped from the room.

*

A week earlier, Archbishop Snoke had summoned Armitage to his cathedral in Rouen. The prayers of the matins liturgy still hung in the air. The monk’s footsteps echoed through the cavernous reception room. He sank to his knees.

“Your Grace.” Armitage bowed his head.

“My son.” The archbishop’s voice was cultured and sonorous, almost gentle, in contrast to his reputation as a fierce Church reformer. He had taken the decaying and corrupt monasteries of his diocese, imposed strict discipline on the inhabitants, and added them to the network of abbeys he called the First Order. He had also appointed Armitage to his post, making him the youngest abbot in Mont-Saint-Ren’s history.

The archbishop gestured to him to stand. “As you know, these are dark times. The tide of heresy rises throughout the land.” In the weak pre-dawn light, his pale features looked like the melted wax that dripped from the altar candles.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“We must fight the heathens with new weapons, as they fight us. Accordingly, Mont-Saint-Ren shall receive a new brother.”

“An oblate, Your Grace?” Almost all the monks, like Armitage himself, were oblates – _offerings_ – given to the church as small children.

“No, a grown man.”

The abbot repressed a frown. “A novice then?” Adult initiates were always trouble. 

“Not a novice, but a guest.”

“May I ask his origins?

“You may not,” the archbishop intoned from his elevated stone chair, “however, I shall tell you this: God has granted him spiritual gifts, great powers beyond the knowledge and understanding of ordinary men. He shall serve us in our coming battle against heresy. See to it that you show our new brother every Christian kindness.”

“Very well, Your Grace.”

“I leave this to you. As you know, our plans are progressing. In light of our successes, the pope has given me a dozen more monasteries to reform and bring within the First Order.”

“Excellent.” Armitage permitted himself a rare smile. “Soon the corrupt old Benedictine Order will be entirely replaced. The Holy Father must be well pleased.” He knew that through his monastic reforms and persecutions, Snoke sought to win the Pope’s favor and be appointed a cardinal.

“Yes, and soon we shall vanquish the last of the heretics and rise to cleanse the Mother Church of her depravity. You, my most trusted inquisitor, shall be my instrument in this. Meanwhile, I leave our fortress in your capable hands.”

*

Cloud shrouded the moon and a bitter wind howled around Mont-Saint-Ren. Cut off from the mainland during high tide, the citadel was hard to reach and easy to defend. From the battlements, a red-headed man watched a horseman cantering across the glimmering sand. His traveling cloak whipped around him and sprays of salt water slapped across the causeway. “What kind of a monk rides a horse?” Armitage muttered. A monk could travel by foot, or perhaps, in imitation of Christ, on a humble donkey, but not on a huge shining black charger. He limped down the spiral staircase, the ache of winter settling deep in his bones. His right hip protested every step, sending a sharp burst of agony singing along his nerves. “Gratias Deo pro hanc passionem ago” he whispered. _I give thanks to God for this suffering._ His recognition of the redemptive power of pain did nothing to improve his mood.

The novice on night watch, Brother Dopheld, struggled with the iron bars that held closed the door. Entering the front hallway, Armitage sighed. If Dopheld was on duty, that meant Brother Finnian, whose watch it was, had run away again. The door opened and the man blew into the keep, wrapped in shreds of tattered night.

“Brother Kylo, I trust God provided a safe journey?” Armitage greeted him.

“Thanks be to God.” The new man responded curtly, dropping his travelling cloak. Dopheld scurried to pick up the garment. “My stallion needs hay, oats, and fresh apples,” he announced. From the courtyard came the sound of iron ringing on stone and the yelps of the porter as he tried to control the fiery beast.

The stranger was very tall. His cowl obscured all his features except his prominent nose. From within the depths of his hood, his eyes burned cold, like moonlight on a river. Rain and ocean water puddled around his feet. “So you’re the inquisitor,” he stared at Armitage. “I thought you’d be bigger.” He shrugged and turned to Brother Dopheld. “Show me to my rooms,” he demanded, before striding away, trailing the startled man in his wake.

In his own humble cell, Armitage completed his prayers and rose from the floor. He would be up again before dawn. He wriggled under the rough blankets that covered his lumpy straw cot, trying in vain to find a comfortable position for his leg. He curled around the only source of warmth in the whole monastery. “I don’t think he’s much of a monk,” he informed Saint Millicent. The orange cat purred in her sleep.

Over the next week, the abbot avoided Brother Kylo. Being abbot required all of his time and patience, and if his thoughts sometimes wandered to the tall broad-shouldered body concealed by black cloth, he repressed them swiftly. Reports reached him, though, of the man consuming too much wine at dinner and more than his share of meat. He practiced fencing in the herb garden, and his accursed horse bit Brother Dopheld. Armitage knew that in the old unreformed monasteries, drunkenness and feasting was the norm. In those dens of depravity, monks kept chargers, falcons, and even mistresses, but such hints of licentiousness must never sully a house of the First Order. He seethed to himself. He would have to take matters in hand.

*

“The heretics rise up against us and against our Mother Church,” declaimed Armitage from the pulpit. “They spread throughout our lands, preaching _lies_ and bringing eternal damnation to those souls they corrupt with their foul teachings.” Armitage’s eyes roved over the assembled monks. Clad in their plain black robes, they appeared almost identical, stripped of individuality, just as they had been stripped of their original names when they entered the monastery. “The end days will soon be upon us,” he continued, “and with them the last battle between the forces of light, the soldiers of God, on the one side, and, on the other, the _loathsome_ armies of disorder that would seek to usher in a new age of darkness.” Conspicuously absent from Sunday morning mass was the slouching figure of brother Kylo. The abbot narrowed his pale eyes in annoyance and added it to his mental list of the man’s transgressions. He wrenched his attention back to the sermon. “We, as warriors of the Lord, shall stamp out the voices of dissent wherever we find them. We shall hunt down the heretics and we shall _MAKE THEM BURN_!”

It was a passionate and rousing sermon, and Armitage wished that the new monk had been there to hear it. But why should he care for the opinion of that arrogant man? He quashed the thought and berated himself for indulging the sin of vanity.

*

“The archbishop ordered you to make every accommodation for me.” The cowl cast his face in shadows, and Armitage could not discern his expression, but he detected the gentle lilt of amusement in his voice. “Therefore, if it is necessary to my spiritual progress to read Saint Augustine, rather than attend your _edifying_ sermon, you must accept that fact.”

“Can you even read?” The abbot sneered. Few men could, other than those raised in monasteries.

“Do you think I am some stupid knight, raised only for jousting and whoring?” Kylo seemed amused. “I regret to inform you that my education was impeccable. I read not only the Church Fathers, but those Roman poets whose books you keep under lock and key lest their wicked tongues lead boys astray.”

“Regardless of your taste in literature, the archbishop has placed this monastery, and the brothers within it, under my authority.” He knew very well that Brother Kylo had not been in the library reading during morning mass, but sleeping in his comfortable bed. (Much to the abbot's irritation, Snoke had decreed that Kylo be given the spacious quarters reserved for visiting aristocracy, rather than a monk’s cell.) “Your arrogance and disobedience are unbecoming in a monk, and since the care of your immortal soul falls to my hands, I must ensure that you are purged of your sins,” he hissed venomously.

“Really, _Father_?” He placed a sarcastic emphasis on title. “And what do you propose?”

“Do you goad me, brother?” Within his robe’s long sleeves, he dug his fingers into his palms. He had somehow allowed this infuriating man to rile him, and now he risked losing his carefully cultivated restraint. Ruling a community of monks – men denied all the usual passions and releases of their sex – required iron control, and that began with the unbending mastery of one’s self. He unclenched his fists and released his anger. He would act, as he always did in the correction of monks, only out of compassion. “Leniency is not a kindness. Mercy is given through discipline, and the spirit is purified through the flesh. Do you submit to this grace?”

“Yes,” he muttered, still sounding defiant.

“Strip to your waist.” For a moment, he thought that the younger man would disobey him. Kylo yanked the hooded cowl from his shoulders and stood regarding the abbot, a faint smirk playing on his lips, and then, without breaking eye contact, he untied his leather belt and pulled his black wool tunic over his head, followed by his linen undershirt. He stood there in just his linen braies, staring back at him, unabashed.

Armitage regarded his long hair, well-muscled arms, and chiseled alabaster torso. This was no monk, but a knight, trained in physical combat, and finely honed as a weapon. Once again he found himself wondering about Brother Kylo’s background. More pressing and troubling thoughts crowded his head and, even as he delivered the chastisement with unerring blows, the marrow in his bones burned with shame. Ever since adolescence, Armitage had fought sinful urges of the flesh. Satan whispered to him just as surely as the serpent had beseeched Eve in the garden: _eat of the fruit and your eyes shall be opened and you shall be as gods_. Armitage knew the thought was as sinful as the act. In confession, he would unburden his heart of these secret longings and seek absolution for his weakness.

*

Later, in the solitary darkness of his cell, the abbot mortified his flesh, crying around the gag of wadded cloth, as he brought the braided flogger against his own back. He increased the speed and intensity of the blows so the thin stinging strands cut into his skin. The searing pain burned away the horrible turmoil he felt inside, replacing that muddy confusion with its sharp, bright light.

*

Fan art by the wonderful [fuchsmitbrezel](http://fuchsmitbrezel.tumblr.com).


	2. I Sleep But My Heart Wakens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The abbot imposes some serious discipline in the torture dungeon, meets Upsilon the horse, and experiences the miraculous.

**I sleep, but my heart wakens: it is the voice of my beloved that knocks,**

**saying, “Open to me … my love, my dove, my undefiled:**

**for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.”**

**~ _Song of Solomon_ , 5:2**

 

 Monastic time was circular. The monk’s day was divided into manual labor, contemplation, and the _Opus Dei_ , the work of God, which was the liturgy. The prayers, the chants, the recitation of psalms, and the singing of hymns divided each day, just as the cycle of celebrations – of Christ’s birth and passion, and the saints’ feast days – punctuated each year. Day after day, year after year, the pattern repeated, in a kind of comforting monotony. Armitage, who had been given to Mont-Saint-Ren at four years of age, knew nothing else.

Kylo, however, had other ideas. When he prayed, it was in private, in darkness and in silence. He meditated late into the night and slept until the sun was high. Most days he saddled up his charger and tore off across the countryside. Other days he received mysterious visitors, cloaked and hooded mendicants, scruffy peasants, and greasy merchants in the parlor. The archbishop had informed Armitage that Kylo was to be exempt from regular monastic life due to his “special duties” in the war against the heretics. The abbot was livid.

The parlor, in which a fire always burned, was the warmest room in the monastery, and in the short breaks between his never-ending tasks, Armitage would go there to chase the chill from his aching bones. Today, only two men were within: Brother Kylo and an unknown visitor. Kylo had a large hand wrapped around the stranger’s throat. “What do you mean, you lost the map?” he yelled, as the man sputtered and his pulpy face turned red.

“Brother Kylo!” shouted Armitage. “Cease this at once. I will not have such violence in the house of God!” Kylo met his furious gaze with a challenging stare, but he released the terrified man, who scuttled from the room as fast as he could. Kylo sank into a chair by the fire.

“What is the meaning of this?” Armitage asked coldly. He remained standing.

“He failed to locate a map that would have led me to the heretics’ prophet.”

“And do you think that justification for your behavior? Your arrogance astounds me, monk.”

“I am not a good monk, father. I lack humility and patience and kindness,” he spoke quietly, looking into the abbot's eyes. “I hear you have a whole room devoted to the correction of wayward souls.”

Armitage stared back in shock. There was indeed such a room beneath the monastery, a dungeon dug into the very mountain, with granite walls so thick no screams might escape. He had never taken a monk there, though, only the worst of heretics, from whom he would extract confessions. His anger bled away, replaced by a frisson of excitement, the shivery sensation of leaping into cold water on a hot day. _It is only my fervor for the correction of this strong-willed brother_ , he told himself. _I am always zealous in my work_. “Come with me.” He strode away, not checking to see if Kylo was following.

They passed through an unremarkable door and proceeded down a narrow spiral staircase cut into the stone. Armitage snatched a brazier from a wall sconce to light their way. The air grew musty and stale. Finally they arrived in a large circular chamber. Wooden and iron apparatus furnished the space: a rack, a cage in the shape of a man, a small pyramid over which a harness was suspended, a Saint Andrew’s Cross, and other devices, beyond name and common knowledge. Various cudgels, whips, and iron masks hung on the far wall. Shelves held various unguents and elixirs.

“Are you sure about this? It is well beyond the usual discipline for monks.”

“I am not the usual kind of monk.”

“The wretched creatures I corrected here …” the abbot paused, unsure how to explain his activities, “… I sought to stamp out the heresy, and save their souls, not their bodies.” He had not wished – he told himself – to cause pain _per se_ , but, in the fire of his righteousness, the suffering of the heretics’ animal bodies had counted as nothing when weighed against the immortal souls whose salvation they threatened, or against the glory of the Church. He had tortured them until they sang, babbling their co-conspirators’ names and locations, and if afterwards a strange flood had rushed through his limbs, a buoyant surge of strength and power, he had buried it deep beneath the layers of learned humility.

“I trust you,” Kylo’s smile was lupine. “Besides, if you damage me beyond repair, Snoke will have your head.”

“Very well. We shall use the rack.” He indicated the device in the center of the room. “Undress.”

He bound Kylo face down, tying his wrists and ankles with leather cord to the bars at each end of the rack. He made sure that the leather was firm but not so tight it would hinder blood flow. He cranked the machine’s handle a half revolution, expanding the distance between the two bars, and stretching Kylo’s body. It was the first time Armitage had seen the man fully naked, and while he had turned away to preserve his modesty as the man shed his garments, now he could not avoid gazing at the muscular curve of his buttocks and the solid pillars of his thighs.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he whispered in the man’s ear, “too much, I mean.” He leaned so close that Kylo’s shiny black hair brushed his face. “If I am injuring you excessively, you must tell me. You’ll be crying out and begging me to stop in minutes, but if you really mean it, profess the Trinity.”

“In nomine Patris, Filii et Spiritus Sancti _?” In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit._ Kylo sounded amused. “How about Monica?”

“Saint Augustine’s mother? I think she would be more likely to give a lashing than save you from one,” he suppressed a snort. He chose a flexible rod and a cat o’ nine tails woven from tight copper wire. He began with the rod, inflicting perfectly aligned stripes across Kylo’s buttocks and upper thighs. Kylo held his silence for the first dozen blows, but then groaned as Armitage landed the subsequent strikes across the skin he had already marked. Angry welts bloomed across the pale flesh. He tightened the rack another quarter revolution, earning a choked gasp of surprise from the bound man. He was stretched almost to his limits.

Armitage took the cat o’ nine tails and brought the knotted cords down over Kylo's upper back, avoiding his neck, spine, and elbows. His grip on the flogger was firm but not rigid. He started softly, brushing the falls across the flesh, a mere whisper and a promise, and then increased the strength of the blows. He knew from his own self-inflicted beatings how fast to swing and when to pull back to vary the thud and the sting of impact. His technique was flawless, honed on heretics, but now, rather than using it to extract confessions, he used his expertise and knowledge of human anatomy to avoid causing damage. Kylo screamed and began to sob as he repeated the action, now wielding the cat almost as harshly against Kylo as he did against his own sinful flesh, then punctuating the cruel assault with lighter blows. He varied the strikes while maintaining a steady rhythm, building up to a crescendo and then diminishing their severity, over and over. Kylo moaned and thrashed on the rack, as if to evade or arch into the strikes raining down upon him. Small flecks of blood spattered the walls and Armitage himself.

Armitage’s veins were tongues of fire. The elation of bending such a beautiful wayward creature to his will made him feel strong and whole. He wanted to run his hands over the curves of his shoulders and down the carved muscles and tendons of his arms, to encircle the wrists and enlace those large fingers with his own. He wanted to dip his head into the soft angle where Kylo’s neck met his shoulder and inhale, to taste the pale vellum of his back, the moonwhite skin peppered with moles and marked with Armitage’s blows. He would bring his lips to the gentle unmarred valley of his lower back, to touch that sweet hollow just above the firm buttocks. He would unfurl his tongue…

Armitage rebuked himself for such thoughts, and paused, calming his breath, before resuming the discipline. He saw the growing exhaustion of Kylo’s sweat-sheened body and the quiver in his limbs. “Just seven more,” he commanded. “Count them for me.”

“You were so good,” he praised when the punishment was over. Truly, he had never seen a monk receive correction as well. _You were so beautiful_ , whispered the serpent in his mind. Armitage unbound him and rubbed his wrists and ankles where they had chaffed against the restraints, and then helped him stand. Kylo was trembling as Armitagehelped him dress. “Can you walk?” He nodded, leaning on the abbot. When they emerged from the hidden staircase, the sky was dark, and they had missed vespers. He helped Kylo to his guest quarters and sat him on the edge of the bed, then went to fetch a bowl of brine, a cloth, and a pot of willow-bark salve.

When he returned, Kylo was lying naked on his stomach, exposing his injuries. Armitage dabbed gingerly at the lacerated flesh, marveling at the punishment the man had endured. He covered his hands in the salve, running them over the burning crenelated flesh, losing himself in the sensation. His own gentleness now surprised him; he was used to inflicting pain, but not tenderness. Kylo gasped as the abbot smoothed his fingers over his inflamed shoulder blades.

“Are you all right?”

Kylo nodded into the pillow. “My whole back feels like it’s on fire,” he said, sounding contented. Kylo turned his head to gaze at Armitage. His face was relaxed, his eyes tranquil.

Armitage felt strangely at peace too, but it was not the quiet calm that followed the hypnotic chanting and familiar rituals of the liturgy. Rather a soft floating energy suffused his limbs, making him feel good, powerful, and at ease in his own body. He did not examine the feeling too closely.

*

“Come with me, I have something to show you.” Brother Kylo burst into the abbot’s office unannounced. He was not wearing his monastic robes, but rather black breeches, a belted charcoal tunic, and soft knee-high leather boots.

Armitage sighed, but he put down his quill and capped his ink pot. He had been reviewing the abbey’s budget and, as infuriating as he found Brother Kylo, he was glad of the interruption. Following Kylo from the room, he tried not to think of the shape of the man that his clothes revealed or of the marks he had left all over that broad back. They left the abbey proper and walked through the village that clung to its walls, winding down through steep narrow alleys, past a haphazard assemblage houses, shops, and a tavern, until they arrived at a small barn. Inside were two goats, a bored looking donkey, a grumpy chestnut pony, and a black beast from the pits of hell - Kylo's horse.

“Why do you keep him here?”

“There’s not enough room in the monastery. Also, he really hates chanting.”

“Brother Upsilon meet the Abbot.”

“ _Brother_ Upsilon? Is he a monk too?”

“The holy fool of Assisi thinks that all the animals are our brothers and sisters. I hear he preaches to the birds.” Kylo tried to halter the shining creature and Upsilon pinned his ears flat and snaked his neck, trying to bite him. “My dear heart,” cooed Kylo, deftly evading the stallion’s gnashing teeth, “I love you too.”

“Why did you name him after a Greek letter?” Armitage stood back as Kylo saddled his horse.

“His mother was called Omega – big O – so we called him Omicron – little O – until he grew so big, then we found him a different letter.” Kylo shrugged as though it made sense. “I call him Oopsy.” He shoved the bit between the horse’s teeth and buckled the bridle, before leading the hulking beast from the barn. “Hold this.” Kylo shoved a leather crop into Armitage’s hand.

Armitagelimped after them at a safe distance from the vicious hooves as they descended the steep hillside. They emerged through the gates and out onto the sand flats that surrounded the island. Kylo took the crop and swung easily onto the horse. Upsilon champed angrily at the bit and reared up, pawing the air far above Armitage’s head.

Kylo laughed and spurred the stallion forwards, flicking the crop against his rump. The horse careened into a flat out gallop, hooves barely skimming the sand, breaking his stride to buck now and then, attempting to unseat his rider. Kylo urged him on, faster and faster, and then forced him to run in smaller and smaller circles, to the left and the right, drawing his muscled neck in with tight reins. He slowed the horse into a gentle canter and then a gliding trot. His gait was smooth and powerful as he propelled himself forward with his hindquarters. Upsilon was no longer fighting. He pricked his ears forward, clearly enjoying himself. Armitagewatched, captivated, despite himself, by the sinuous harmony of horse and rider.

Kylo finally looped back, bringing the heaving, sweating creature to a stop by Armitage, and leaping to the ground. Kylo scratched Upsilon behind his soft ears and the horse leaned into his hand “Nasty brute,” he said, before turning to Armitage. “Now he decides he likes me.”

“After you run him ragged?”

“He tests me to see if I am worthy of being his leader and, when he is satisfied that I am, then he trusts me, loves me even.” The abbot reached out a tentative hand to touch the velvet muzzle. “Whereas every day Brother Dopheld brings him apples and brushes his mane, thinking to win his affection through kindness,” Kylo laughed, “and then Upsilon tries to kill him.”

“Does it have to be such a battle? Could one not find a tame animal who would willingly do one’s bidding?” Armitage asked. Brother Kylo’s attempt at allegory, he thought, was as subtle as his great black steed.

“One could buy a dappled palfrey, a lady’s horse, as docile and sweet as a rabbit, but what would be the sport in that?” Kylo tilted his head, fixing Armitage with an appraising gaze. “Have you ever ridden a horse?” Armitage shook his head in alarm. “It’s the closest thing men have to flying. You’re not scared are you?” Kylo wrapped one arm around his waist and lifted him effortlessly onto the horse’s back. Upsilon rolled his eyes and stomped. “Don’t mind him. He’s had many a blushing maiden on his back.” Kylo mounted in front of Armitage. “Hold on to me,” he ordered, and then they were off.

Armitage squeezed his eyes shut and clung to the solid heat of the man in front of him. After the moment of vertigo passed, he opened his eyes, squinting them against the cold salt spray splashed up by the horse’s hooves. The bright air rushed into his lungs and his head spun as they flew along the blurred line between heaven and earth, flaying the sharp winter light like a dark blade. The island citadel of spires, the only home he had ever known, was perfectly mirrored in the shining sand, as they galloped faster and faster, pounding across the wet sand. A strange feeling bubbled up in his belly and chest, his face split open and he realized he was laughing. Actually laughing. He could not remember ever doing so before. It was unbecoming in a monk, let alone an abbot. Brother Francis laughed, Armitage had heard, but he was as likely to be declared a heretic as a saint. He tried to restrain himself, but that made it worse, and he found he couldn’t stop.

Kylo dismounted and lifted him down. “You are so small.” The taller man’s eyes glowed. Armitage would have liked to issue a sharp retort, but he was breathless and a strange alien joy was hammering in his chest. He schooled his face into its habitual scowl, angry at himself for laughing, and angrier still that Kylo had been the one to cause it.

“I am a monk, and built like one, whereas you are a knight.” Armitage’s hands were still on Kylo’s biceps, Kylo’s warm hands wrapped around his waist.

“I was a knight. Now I am a monk, or perhaps I am both.”

“A Templar then?”

“No, not a Templar. Something different. Something new.”

 

*

 

Armitage nervously awaited Snoke’s arrival. He always felt that the man could see into his very soul. Brother Kylo knelt calmly beside him. The archbishop routinely toured the monasteries in his diocese, and had summoned them both during his visit to Mont-Saint-Ren.

“My sons,” Snoke greeted them in his sonorous voice as he swept into the room, wearing gold-brocaded cream robes and a matching miter.

“Your Grace,” they replied in unison.

Snoke smiled at Kylo indulgently and then turned to Armitage. “When last we spoke,” he intoned, “I asked you to extend every hospitality to our honored guest. And yet, I hear that you have chastised him most severely, that you dared punish him for disobedience as though he were merely one of your monks!” Snoke’s voice rose to a dangerous pitch.

“Father, the abbot has shown me nothing but Christian kindness!” Kylo surprised Armitage by leaping to his defense.

“Is that so?” The aged prelate’s face twisted in suspicion. “Very well, Kylo, show me your back.”

Armitage held his breath. Now Kylo would be revealed as a liar, and Snoke would punish them both. Kylo unbelted his robes, pulled his garments over his head in a single motion, and then turned around, revealing his back to Snoke. Armitage almost gasped. The ivory skin was unblemished, perfect but for its scattering of moles.

“Very well,” said the Archbishop sounding displeased. “My sources are clearly flawed. Brother Kylo, you will have many battles in the coming months pertaining to our holy war. The heretics must be stamped out. Armitage, continue to provide him with every assistance .”

“Yes, Your Grace."

Snoke dismissed them, and Armitage hurried after Kylo, following him to his quarters.

“You lied to the archbishop!” he accused rounding on the man as soon as they were within his opulent chambers. The walls were decorated with allegorical embroidered tapestries depicting virgins and unicorns on grounds of lush flowers. An ornately carved four-poster bed was draped in deep red velvet curtains.

“No. I just have a different definition of Christian kindness. You gave me what I required.”

“How was your back unmarked? What witchcraft was that?” he demanded,

“No witchcraft. Only God’s work.”

“The difference between a saint and a sorcerer can be very subtle. Know that I have burned men for less.”

“How suspicious you are, Father, and how vicious.”

“All I know is that I made you bleed. I cut your back to shreds, and now there is not a mark on you.” He pulled at Kylo’s belt and lifted his habit, revealing, once again, the perfect creamy expanse of his skin. He ran his fingers over it, as though his sense of touch might reveal his eyes’ deception, but it felt like new vellum beneath his hands.

“How is this possible?”

“Here, let me show you.” Kylo, his garments still awry, pushed Armitagedown by his shoulders, so he was sitting on the edge of the large bed. “Your hip pains you. I see it when you walk. The bone scrapes against the bone.”

“I am an old man."

“Old for a peasant, maybe, but still young for a lord.” He knelt before him and held his hips, leaning his forehead against his belly.

“What are you doing?”

“Hush, I need to concentrate, to pray without words, to draw upon the force of God.” Kylo’s right hand gripped his left hip tightly.

Armitage felt preternaturally aware of the man’s proximity, of his hands and his head touching him, and of a deep warmth blossoming in his hip. The heat rose and spread, becoming almost unbearable, and then gradually receded, taking the pain with it as it ebbed.

Kylo slumped back, exhausted. Armitage stood. He placed weight tentatively on his left leg, and then walked briskly around the room. Nothing hurt. For the first time in a decade, his left hip felt exactly like his right. He stopped in front of Kylo, grabbing him by his bare shoulders. “What is this sorcery? What have you done?”

“I assure you, it is not the devil’s work. For what demon would love you so much? It can only be God’s doing.”

“Demons are infinitely clever in their deceptions!”

“And God is infinitely great in his mercy!” Kylo replied, wearily, as he hoisted himself onto the bed. “Now, if you don’t mind, I need to rest.” He curled up with his back to Armitage and promptly fell asleep.

That night, Armitage lay down and, for the first time in a decade, he did not hurt. He felt the residual heat of the man’s hands on his body. He wanted to tell Saint Millicent about it, but that night she did not warm his narrow bed.

 

*

 

Gorgeous fan art by [fuchsmitbrezel](http://fuchsmitbrezel.tumblr.com), who discusses the architecture in the piece [here](http://fuchsmitbrezel.tumblr.com/post/149005564191).

 

*

 

 

 

**Upsilon from a medieval manuscript.**

(Actually folio 10v of the [Morgan Library's Crusader Bible](http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/Crusader-Bible), made around 1240, showing a scene from the book of Joshua).

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kylo’s horse, Upsilon, is something like a [Friesian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friesian_horse). He is, of course, named for the Upsilon-class Command Shuttle that transports canon Kylo Ren.


	3. Fair as the Moon, Clear as the Sun, and Terrible as an Army with Banners

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo riles Armitage in the confessional. An encounter with heretics leads to revelations about Kylo’s past and Armitage’s as well. Kylo’s continued bad behavior prompts a very public punishment and a fundamental change in their relationship.

**“Who is this that goes forth like the rising dawn,**

**fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?”**

**~ _Song of Solomon_ , 6:9**

 

“Bless me father, for I have sinned.”

Armitage stared at the unmistakable beaked profile through the latticed screen of the confessional. Many of the monks in the abbey were ordained priests and able to hear confession, but _of course_ Kylo had chosen the abbot.

“How long since your last confession?”

“About three months.”

“What is your sin, child?”

“I have kindled lust in my heart.” Of course, thought Armitage. Kylo was the most _infuriating_ monk. He repressed any thought of his own sinful desires. This was not the time to examine one’s own conscience.

“Have you acted upon this feeling?”

“I have acted against nature.” Long years as a priest had inured Armitage to confessions, but he nonetheless found his breath quickening.

“What have you done?”

“I have succumbed to the sin of onanism.” The abbot assuredly did _not_ think about the brother, his pale skin exposed in the privacy of his rooms, his large hand furiously working his flesh, head flung back in ecstasy, wide mouth open, eyes screwed shut, trying to stifle his desperate moans.

“Do you repent of your sins?” There was a long pause. “Are you contrite? Do you promise to desist from these sins in future?”

“Can’t you just assign me some penance?”

“Without contrition, penance is meaningless. There can be no absolution without contrition.”

The monk on the far side of the screen snorted. “I’ll think about it,” he got up and stalked off, leaving Armitage exasperated. As the spiritual head of the house, the care of all the congregation's souls fell to him, so this monk’s unabsolved sins weighed against his own soul. Kylo would be his damnation.

*

Kylo, awake uncharacteristically early, accosted the abbot after the celebration of Prime and dragged him to his room. “Unhand me!” demanded the abbot, struggling to free himself from the man’s iron grip.

“No, we must hurry. Heretics are about.” Kylo sounded almost gleeful. “I received some news on the whereabouts of the preachers today. I thought you should see them in the flesh,” he flashed a predatory grin, “maybe burn one or two.”

Armitage huffed, and broke free of the larger man as they entered his chambers. He had confronted and condemned various species of heretic – Waldensians, Cathars, the occasional witch, and even one werewolf – but he had not yet encountered an adherent of the newest threat. They called themselves the _Ecclesia Virium Dei_ – the Church of the Force of God – and in addition to the usual nonsense, like denying priestly authority, preaching in public, and taking vows of poverty, they revered God as some sort of impersonal power rather then worshipping the Trinity.

“Here,” Kylo, who had been scrabbling around a chaotic pile of clothing on his floor, thrust a handful of fabric at him, “put this on.”

The abbot glared at the slightly wrinkled garments – black linen breeches and a long-sleeved black silk tunic brocaded with deep red and silver many-pointed stars. They were clothes for a prince. “Are you insane? I’m not wearing this.”

“Well, you can hardly go looking like a monk, if you want to infiltrate a mob of heretics,” Kylo rolled his eyes as he unbelted his robe. He was wearing no undershirt, and Armitage tried not to stare at his lithe and muscled body. Kylo’s new attire consisted of a long belted tunic of coarse black fabric, split below the waist, breeches, and a ragged mantle.

He turned to avoid Kylo’s gaze and reluctantly dressed in the borrowed finery. He smoothed out the creased tunic, marveling at the smooth fabric beneath his hands. He rolled the sleeves up at the cuffs. The garment was too broad across his chest, but the belt pulled in the excess fabric at his waist.

“It suits you.” Kylo was watching him, his face entirely transformed by a genuine smile. “Put this on and you won’t look like a monk at all," he said, handing him a black silk traveling cap. "We shall call you Lord Armitage of Brittany!” He draped a long red cloak around the smaller man’s shoulders and fastened it with a peculiar brooch in the shape of a crow with garnet eyes. The abbot glared, but more out of habit than malice. That smile was disarming. He put on his boots without complaint.

Kylo completed his own outfit with knee-high boots, gloves, and a girdle to which he strapped a sheathed broadsword.

“I can’t believe you have a sword in the abbey.” Armitage’s ephemeral good mood evaporated. It was almost as though Kylo kept a checklist of monastic rules just to make sure he was breaking each one.

“I bet you can believe it.” He grinned and grabbed a blackened and battered iron mask from the floor. “I have a helmet too.”

Kylo strode from the room and Armitage caught up with him, chin held high, daring any of the brothers to comment on his attire. Brother Dopheld gulped, and wisely got out of the way. The abbot thought he detected a hint of a smirk from Brother Phasmos, the prior, but then he often glimpsed such an expression on the man’s incongruously angelic face.

When they reached the barn, Upsilon was already saddled up and wearing a black satin blanket featuring several of the multi-pointed stars in silver. The village boy whom Kylo had paid or coerced into acting as groom handed over the reins.

“You dressed me like the horse,” fumed Armitage.

“My big black charger and my little chestnut stallion,” teased Kylo as he lifted Armitageonto the back of the horse. Upsilon was in a foul mood, snorting and swishing his tail, but Kylo kept him on a tight rein as they slowly wound down through the village and onto the salt flats that separated Mont-Saint-Ren from the mainland.

They rode inland and then west for two hours, as the watery early light ripened into day. To Armitage it felt much longer. He was cold and his legs were stiff and numb by the time they reached the town of Dol. It was a market day and the streets were bustling with foot traffic and heavily laden donkeys. Kylo hitched Upsilon to a tree and helped Armitage dismount, kneeling at his feet to rub feeling back into his legs.

Although no one would have taken them for monks, they made a conspicuous pair. In his iron helmet and dull black tunic, Kylo was an intimidating figure. Peasants and merchants gave the strange knight and the noble a wide berth. “Try not to draw attention,” Kylo whispered. “We hardly want a mob of heretics noticing that the most notorious inquisitor in France is in their midst.” Armitage knew that the peasants, heretics, and sympathizers called him “the red-headed devil.” They said the fires on which he burned the condemned were as bright as his hair.

A large crowd had gathered in the town square. A few of them were investigating the market stalls set up around the space’s periphery, but most were listening, rapt, to the tiny wizened figure standing on the steps of the squat Romanesque cathedral.

Armitage was shocked to see that the ancient preacher was a woman. He snarled under his breath. Despite her small stature, her voice carried across the square and demanded attention. “The Force moves through and surrounds every living thing. Close your eyes. Feel it. The light … It’s always been there. It will guide you.”

Armitage was almost hyperventilating in horror as the charismatic woman spread her abominable doctrine to the eager crowd. He felt a large warm arm on his bicep and then Kylo was dragging him away from the crowd. “Are you all right?” He nodded although he felt dizzy. He wanted to set fire to something, or, preferably, someone. His musings were interrupted by the noisy approach of an older man.

“Ben!” he shouted. Kylo tensed and dropped Armitage's arm. He whirled around to face the stranger. The newcomer had unkempt grey hair and a lined face. His brown silk tunic and leather boots were scruffy but clearly expensive and he carried himself with an easy confidence that showed his aristocratic heritage. He shot Armitage a confused glance, before returning his attention to Kylo. “Ben,” he repeated, “come home. Your mother misses you.”

“It’s too late,” replied Kylo. His voice from within the mask was metallic and distorted.

He drew his sword from the scabbard. Its battered blade and was etched with Germanic runes. It was a very ancient design – not French at all, but more like something the Northmen of old would have carried.

“Kylo, no!” Armitage ordered. “You're drawing too much attention.” Already several people had turned in their direction and were staring curiously. Armitage placed his hand on Kylo’s right forearm and gently forced it down. Kylo sheathed his sword and stormed away. “Who was that?” he asked, catching him up.

“Just someone I knew in Languedoc.”

“You’re from Languedoc? Like the heretics?”

“Yes.”

“He called you Ben.”

“That was my name before. Didn’t you have a name before you became a monk?”

“No, I have always been Armitagel. I can remember no other.”

“Hux,” Kylo told him. “Your name was Hux.”

“How do you know that? He demanded, but Kylo said nothing.

They rode back to the abbey in a surly silence.

 

*

 

Brother Phasmos burst into his office. “Father, come quickly.”

“What’s wrong?” Phasmos, the Prior, was the most reliable of his monks, and would never disturb him over a triviality.

“It’s brother Kylo. I think he’s gone mad.” As he hurried after Phasmos, the sounds of metal clanging on stone grew louder.

They followed the noise to the parlor where Kylo stood, weapon in hand, breathing heavily, as if pausing in a battle with invisible foes. The sword flickered red in the firelight. Around him lay dismembered chairs and tables.

“Like Ajax slaying the cattle,” Armitagevv observed from the doorway. The knight rounded on him, eyes wild, sword held aloft.

“Do you mock me?”

“Put down your weapon, brother,” he spoke with steely authority. For the second time that day, Kylo lowered his sword. “What is the meaning of this?”

“I was angry,” Kylo bit out.

 _Evidently_ , thought Armitage. It was not hard to discern the source of his fury. “That man was your father?” He had gathered as much from their brief conversation.

“I have no father. _If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother … his own life also, he cannot be my disciple_ ,” Kylo quoted from the Gospels.

“That means that you should love Christ above your own family, not that you should literally hate your father.”

“What would you know about fathers?” Kylo sank to the floor in front of the fireplace.

“Not much,” Armitage admitted. “Why do you hate him so much?”

“My parents abandoned me. They were afraid of me. They sent me away to train as a knight.” Armitage could see the reflected flames dancing in his dark eyes.

“You didn’t want to be a knight?”

Kylo shook his head, still looking into the fire. “Did you want to be a monk?”

“I never thought about it. It was God’s will. An oblate becomes a monk, just as a lord’s son becomes a knight.”

Kylo shook his head again. “You don’t understand. I couldn’t become a knight – there were so many voices in my head – God, the Devil, angels – and I couldn’t make them stop. And I could do things – strange things. My parents thought I was possessed by a demon. They brought in all kinds of exorcists and when that didn’t work they sent me away.” He turned to him as he spoke, his eyes pleading, but Armitage didn’t know what he needed. As an abbot, he excelled at organization, discipline, and theology, not pastoral care. He dragged the one intact chair next to the fire and sat down, awkwardly placing one hand on Kylo’s hair. The monk leaned into his touch, resting his head against the abbot’s knee.

Armitage tried to piece together a coherent picture from the man’s ramblings, but there was too much missing. Had the boy’s parents been right, he wondered? Was he possessed? Armitage was no exorcist, but he had seen the ritual performed often enough to know that it was often violent. It was worst when the rite failed and the priest tried ever more brutal methods to force the evil spirit from the host’s body. The thought of the young Kylo – Ben, he supposed – enduring this torment multiple times distressed him in a way he could not understand. After all, his own procedures as an inquisitor were not so different and he had felt no compunction about inflicting excruciating pain in his fight against the forces of chaos. Somehow, with Kylo it was different.

What was the archbishop’s role in all this, he wondered. He ran his hand through Kylo’s soft hair, scratching gentle circles over his scalp as he pondered the mystery. For some time, they sat together quietly in the ruined room, warmed by the flames.

Armitage surveyed the parlor. He could not lightly expel Snoke’s protégé from the abbey nor, to his horror, did he wish to, but such a lapse in the abbey’s discipline – such a challenge to his own authority – must not be seen to go unpunished. He broke their companionable silence. “You need to be disciplined.” He noticed a slight shiver running through the other man. “Do you _enjoy_ being punished, Brother Kylo? If so, it hardly counts.”

“It brings me peace. There’s all this power and rage in my head – all this screaming energy – but when you bind me and flog me, I don’t have to fight it or channel it or do anything at all. All the decisions are yours and I can just be. There is just pain and light and nothing else at all.” He sounded calmer just talking about it.

Armitage considered the relief that self-flagellation sometimes brought. That he understood. The desire to give his power over to another, though, was outside his comprehension. "You present me with a problem."

“How?”

“Through this act,” he indicated the ruined room around them, “you have dramatically undermined the discipline of this monastery. I must be _seen_ to correct you, and yet we know that the archbishop will rebuke me for treating you in such a manner.”

“Are you talking about public chastisement?”

“I am.” Armitage, his hand still in Kylo’s hair, felt a fine tremor pass through the monk.

“If I present myself for it voluntarily, how can Snoke object?”

 

*

 

The bells tolled summoning the brothers to the Chapter meeting in the church’s crypt. Here, a forest of short columns supported vaulted stone arches. The light underground came from braziers in wall sconces, which sent giant shadows scampering across the walls. The air was stale, smoky, and cold.

Forty or so monks sat around the dark edges of the room, a solemn murder of crows. Near the center of the space were a tall oak post to which was affixed a heavy iron ring, and a lectern on which a giant leather-bound book was open. On the eastern wall hung a life-sized crucified Christ, gruesomely realistic in the Gothic style. His skeletal form drooped from the cross. His eyes were closed and a crown of thorns encircled his lolling head.

The abbot entered the Chapter Hall and the brothers all bowed to him as he passed by. He took the lone seat below the sculpture. A monk rose and read from the _Passions of the Martyrs_. The day’s reading described the sufferings and death of Saint Sebastian, stripped naked, tied to a tree, and pierced with arrows.

“We now turn to the correction of faults against good discipline,” announced Armitage. “Are there any accusations or proclamations?”

Kylo rose from his seat and kneeled before the abbot. “I accuse myself of the sins of disobedience and arrogance.”

A gasp went through the crowd. Obedience and humility, along with chastity, were the central virtues of monastic life. Breaking them was a serious matter.

“Are you contrite, Brother Kylo?”

“Yes, father.” Kylo’s eyes were downcast.

“Very well, your penance is to be a public flogging.” Even in the low light, Armitage could see the deep blush suffusing the man’s cheeks.

The assembled monks leaned forward, their eyes gleaming in the dim light. The abbot nodded at Phasmos, who ordered Kylo to strip to and then bound his hands to the iron ring with a length of rope. Phasmos presented the seated abbot with a cat o’ nine tails, kissing both the implement and the abbot’s hands before withdrawing to the shadows. Armitageslowly approached Kylo, and circled him. The crypt was silent, but for the sputtering of flames.

A rush of air and the thud of leather cords on flesh shattered the quiet as the abbotbrought the flogger down on Kylo’s left shoulder, and then his right, working up a rhythm, and building to increasingly powerful strokes. He had already disciplined Kylo on several occasions, but this time felt different, with all the brothers looking on in rapt fascination, drawing a voyeuristic thrill, no doubt, from watching the arrogant monk brought low. He had previously administered punishment in Chapter with perfect equanimity, unconcerned for the spectators, but now he imagined himself as an onlooker, watching the scene. All these eyes were on him, regarding the strength and control with which he disciplined the wayward brother. Kylo, losing his stoic composure, was beginning to twist and whimper beneath the onslaught as welts painted his back.

Armitage was suddenly aware that he was painfully hard, aroused by the public spectacle of his own power and Kylo’s humiliation. A terrible vision assailed his mind – Kylo bent over naked before him, in front of the monks, while he took his pleasure, thrusting into the bound man’s body. Armitage bit his lip, drawing blood, trying to stem the awful tide of desire that threatened to sweep him under. He could see the blood on Kylo’s back, and taste the copper on his lips.

Kylo cried out in pain as one of the blows landed too fast, the stinging tails wrapping around his flank.

“Enough.” Armitage announced, trying to suppress the shaking in his voice, as he gestured to Phasmos to release Kylo.

After Chapter concluded and the brothers dispersed, Armitage helped Kylo back to his quarters. As they walked, the taller man buried his head in the abbot’s neck.

“I’m sorry,” Armitage whispered. “I got carried away. That’s never happened before.”

Kylo sighed wetly against his pulse. “It was wonderful.”

“I thought the humiliation might have made it into a real punishment.”

Kylo snorted. “As if,” he nuzzled the other man’s neck. Armitage shrank back and Kylo laughed softly. “My abbot, I think you enjoyed that as much as I did.” Armitage felt alive and alight, but dangerous too, like lightening about to arc.

“Lie down,” he ordered, pushing Kylo towards his bed. “I will summon a brother from the infirmary to clean your injuries.”

“I would much rather you tended them.” Kylo shed his clothes, wincing as he unpeeled them from his bloody back. He reclined on his side, gazing up at the abbot from under his dark lashes. “ I know you want to.”

He did want to, very much, and Kylo’s words were pulling him under, like honeyed wine. “You are a very persuasive succubus.”

“Don’t call me that.” All the warmth was gone from his tone. “I told you, my parents thought I was a demoniac.”

“I’m sorry.” He reached out a tentative hand and ran his fingers along the bumps of Kylo’s spine. He felt an unfamiliar upwelling of emotion. His compassion had always been directed exclusively towards people’s immortal souls, not anything as trifling as their feelings, but now he experienced a strange squeezing in his chest at the thought that he might have wounded Kylo with his words. Having no memory of his life before Mont-Saint-Ren, he couldn’t fully understand what it might mean to be feared and exiled by one’s parents, but he was learning how deeply Kylo was wounded in invisible places.

The abbot fetched the pitcher and basin from Kylo’s writing table and a fresh linen towel. Once again, he cleaned the injured back and applied the salve, reveling in the textures beneath his hands. He moved carefully, each touch an apology, and Kylo melted into him. His raging lust had quieted, but it remained growling softly in his belly, like a caged beast in the night. He stood up and prepared to leave.

“Stay?” Kylo, languid from the abbot's touch, smiled softly over his shoulder.

 _I can’t_ , he thought, as he tugged off his tunic and folded it, placing it on a chair. He left on his simple linen undershirt. He had always followed the rules of his strictly regimented life as rigorously as he had imposed them. He knew two Biblical verses, several chapters from the monastic regulations, and a dozen passages from the Church Fathers that forbade him from slipping into a soft bed beside the body of another man, but right then none of them seemed to matter. All he felt was the warm glow on his skin, the exhaustion in his limbs, and an unfamiliar aching need in his chest.

Kylo looped an arm around his waist, drawing him closer and sleepily burying his nose in his neck, then his breath settled into a peaceful rhythm. Armitage, floating into sleep, felt a soft purring warmth settling over his legs. “Millicent,” he whispered, “you traitor.”

 

Beautiful Beardsley-esque fan art by [fuchsmitbrezel](http://fuchsmitbrezel.tumblr.com).

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In Greek mythology, as recounted by Sophocles in his tragedy _Ajax_ , the hero, sent mad by the gods, slaughters a herd of cows, thinking that they are his rivals among the Greeks. Armitage is showing off his education, as he does.  
> Kylo quotes from Luke 14:26.  
> Armitage calls Kylo a succubus (a demon in female form) rather than an incubus deliberately. (He knows the difference and would Huxsplain it to you in detail if you asked.)


	4. I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had withdrawn himself and was gone.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When he wakes up in Kylo's bed, the abbot's spiritual turmoil comes to a head.

**“I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had withdrawn himself and was gone:**

**my soul melted when he spoke. I sought him, but I could not find him;**

**I called him, but he gave me no answer.”** ~ ** _Song of Solomon_** **,** 5:6

Armitage awoke warm and comfortable in a rhombus of mead-pale light, which meant that he had slept right through the bells for matins and lauds. He could see the velvet drapes of the four-poster bed and the flowers and animals of the unicorn tapestry, so he was in the guest quarters. Worse yet, he was entangled in sleep-heavy limbs, lying nose to nose with Brother Kylo, whose face, bereft of its usual scowl, looked peaceful and surprisingly young. Kylo’s eyes slowly opened and his unfocused gaze was gentle. He leaned forward and grazed a soft kiss against the abbot’s lips. Armitage froze, torn between his parching bone-deep need and the life-long certainty that his desires were an abomination against God. He scrambled back, struggling out of the nest of arms, blankets, and linen sheets.

“Armitage,” Kylo said drowsily, “it’s all right.”

“It is not all right!" He finally wrested himself free of the arm holding him. "I’ve missed morning service and I’m in bed with - with another monk.”

“Shhh,” soothed Kylo, replacing his arm around the man's waist and scooting closer, “you haven’t done anything wrong. You’re the abbot. You’re allowed to miss service when you have other important duties – and who’s going to call you to account anyway?” Kylo was, of course, right, but that didn’t reassure Armitage, who was sitting on the edge of the soft bed, just trying to breathe. He placed his head in his hands as Kylo wrapped his body around him. “You stayed here to tend to an ailing brother. Who could fault you for such Christian charity?”

Armitage glared at him. “You call this Christian charity? You’re forgetting our vows, Brother.”

“I don’t see anyone breaking any vows,” Kylo rubbed a hand in comforting circles over his back.

“I have committed grave sins,” he sighed. “Sins in my heart.”

“I don’t believe the heart has sins.”

“Then you’re as much a heretic as those you fight against.” The abbot rose and put on his habit, and left without another word.

*

After prime, Armitage retreated to the abbot’s office on the east side of the cloister. The sun scratched weakly against the lead glass windows. He lit a cresset of beef tallow and the room filled with its dull, smoky glow. The abbot tried to look over reports from the monastery’s forests and manorial estates, but the parchment swam before his eyes. His body felt like a bow, pulled taut with no arrow notched, all useless, tight-strung, buzzing energy. His thoughts kept circling back to his appalling transgressions. He had always done precisely as he had been told. He had been a good and obedient monk: he had been chaste, despite his errant desires, and he had tried to be humble, although it had not been easy. He had imposed narrow and fierce standards of behavior and belief on himself and others; he had tortured and killed to defend these certainties, never doubting his righteousness. And now this force of chaos, this demon-knight-monk, had blown into his life and, like a pitiful heretic, he had let his soul be led astray. He felt the desires festering around the edges of his mind. _Pervert_ , the voices whispered in his head. _Sodomite_.

After the midday meal, the hour when torpor dragged heavy at the limbs, he withdrew once again to his cloister office. He was sure he had bolted the door against interruptions, yet Kylo materialized like a phantom in the shadows.

The abbot stood, squaring his shoulders and adopting his sternest expression. “What is your business, Brother Kylo?”

“You know my business, Armitage.” Kylo was luminous in the tallowlight, like the moon at dusk.

“You would address me properly, brother,” he admonished.

Kylo sighed. “You know my business, _my lord abbot_.” He moved so close that Armitage could feel his breath. He desperately wanted to retreat, but he was no coward. He fixed Kylo with his adamantine stare. “There is nothing between us that needs discussing.” He could feel his pulse battering away in his neck, betraying him.

“Don’t lie to me.” Kylo’s fists were clenched by his sides.

“My duties as abbot require me to treat all the brothers with equal kindness. I realize that I have overstepped the boundaries in showing you some preferment, but I assure you it will not happen again.” He hid behind the formal words and his position.

“You showed me _some preferment_? You spent the night in my bed. I held you while you slept.”

“Brother, I beg you, do not speak of this again. I will seek forgiveness from the Lord and perform penance for my sins.”

“Armitage, please, stop pretending that I mean nothing to you.” Kylo grasped the abbot’s upper arms in his large hands.

“You ask me to acknowledge some affection? Some attachment? What you ask is impossible: ‘ _Thou shalt not lie with a man, as with a woman: it is abomination…. If a man lie with a man, as he lieth with a woman … they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them_!’” He wrenched himself free of Kylo’s grasp.

“Leviticus also says we cannot eat pigs, yet I see pork on the table every Sunday!”

“Saint Paul gave us a dispensation. We have been freed by Christ’s blood.”

“Freed to eat pigs, but not to love? Surely if Christ’s blood liberates us from that law, it liberates us from all of it.”

“The Church Fathers think not. And regardless, we have taken monastic vows – poverty, obedience, and _chastity_.”

Kylo snorted. “ _You_ might have. But what if your vows are wrong? I don’t know the God who abides in quotations and regulations. The God I know is clothed in silence and darkness and is beyond all mortal words. And if God provides us this beautiful world and the pleasures within it, who are we to reject this gift?”

“You speak the Devil’s words with honeyed lips, Brother Kylo.”

“Do you want to taste them again to be sure?” He leaned close to his face, his eyes blazing.

The abbot’s composure finally snapped. “Brother! I will not stand for such insolence in my house. Leave my abbey and do not return.”

Kylo’s fury abated as suddenly as it had arisen. “Please do not send me away.” His large eyes shone in the flickering light. “I could not stand it.”

Armitage was aware of an immense cracking and breaking somewhere within himself, but far away, like the reverberation of distant glaciers calving ice into the sea. He could not meet the younger monk’s imploring gaze, but he refused to waver. His position as abbot, his immortal soul, and the moral guidance of his monks all depended on his virtue. Kylo was corruption and putrefaction, a velvet fungus blooming across the skin of the fruit, rotting it on the vine. “You must go,” he commanded and turned away.

*

The abbot remained in his office, ignoring the bells for service, as the afternoon dissolved into grainy blue evening. He felt like new parchment, freshly scraped of flesh, and stretched to translucency, pulled so tight that any flaw in the skin would tear wide open.Finally, he put aside the pretense of work. He was no more at peace for having sent the man away. Instead, he felt a deep yawning ache within, for himself and also, unexpectedly, for Kylo. He kept recalling the lost and broken look on his face. Sharp tendrils of guilt wormed their way into his heart, reminding him that Kylo’s own parents had also banished him for being too wild, wayward, and dangerous. A better abbot – a better man – could have kept him close, offering him Christian love, _agapé_ , without _eros_. His motives in casting him out had been entirely selfish, with no regard for Kylo’s soul, let alone his earthly wellbeing. But since when had he concerned himself with anything as trivial or ephemeral as anyone’s _happiness_? How had that ever mattered compared to eternal salvation? He had wielded his compassion like a scalpel, cutting out the gangrene of heresy. An inquisitor could not afford empathy for the living.

He recalled that when Saint Augustine had been consumed by spiritual turmoil, he had opened the Bible to a random passage to receive divine guidance. So, uttering a brief prayer for God’s help, he picked up the nearest volume of scripture. The book was not ornate, like the beautiful gold-illuminated codices that lay on the altar. Rather it was a worn volume of the Old Testament, written in cramped letters on parchment yellowed with age. It fell open in his hands, and he read the passage before him.

 _By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loves:I sought him, but I did not find him; I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loves, I sought him, but I found him not. The watchmen that go about the city found me: to them I said, “Have you seen him whom my soul loves?” It was but a little time after I passed from them that I found him whom my soul loves: I held him, and would not let him go, until I had brought him into my mother's house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me_.

He read the passage twice, shaking. He was a man who made careful and considered decisions, unswayed by emotion, but now he sprinted out the door and through the cloister. His heart was stampeding in his chest. He rounded the corner to the guest wing, nearly trampling Phasmos, and burst through the door of Kylo’s quarters. He stood there, gasping for air. The fire in the grate had burned down to ashes. The room was cold and empty. He was too late.

Then he noticed that the floor was still covered in clothes. On the far side of the four-poster bed, a tall figure stood up, holding several crumpled garments. He stared in shock as Armitage barreled toward him and enveloped him in a tight embrace. “I’ve hurt you. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. Please stay,” he whispered his litany of remorse into Kylo’s chest.

“You must never send me away again,” the taller monk murmured, cradling Armitage’s face in his large hands and staring through his eyes as though examining his soul.

“Never,” Armitage promised. In the back of his mind, voices were screaming about sin and damnation, but he pushed them down. Compared to the solid reality of Kylo in his arms, they held no power.

Kylo pressed a dry kiss to the smaller man’s forehead. “My liege.”

“My knight.”

Kylo smiled shyly and knelt in the posture of a vassal proclaiming allegiance to his lord.

“Do you wish, without reserve, to become my man?” The abbot pronounced the words of the ritual with mock solemnity.

“I wish it. Of my own free will, I place myself at your service.” Kylo put his right hand on the book that lay beside the bed as he swore the oath: “I swear fealty to you, and only you, my Lord.” He pressed his palms together, as though in prayer, and reached them towards the other man. Armitage enfolded his clasped hands in his own in a gesture of domination and protection.

“Now you will be mine.” He uttered the formulaic response and then bent down to seal the rite with the customary kiss. Kylo’s lips were slightly chapped, but soft. He opened his mouth, yielding to Armitage and inviting him in. It was clumsy and wet and warm, and it sparked a flame deep in his belly, the tongues of fire licking at his innermost organs, threatening an inferno that would consume him.

On the wall, in an embroidered field of flowers, rabbits, and birds, the captive unicorn gazed at the maiden. The maiden regarded the men below her with an enigmatic smile.

 

*

**Art by the wonderful[schaloime](http://schaloime.tumblr.com).**

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Armitage quotes _Leviticus_ 18:22 and 20:13. In countering him, Kylo refers to _Galatians_ 3:13 (“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law by becoming a curse for us”). I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but Kylo actually makes a good point that the New Testament does not say that Christ’s blood only obviates _some_ of the laws, and does not create a distinction between the customary (e.g. dietary) and moral laws of the Old Testament. (Oh God, I’ve written a fanfic with theological footnotes. The nerd is strong in this one.)
> 
> The passage that Armitage reads is _Song of Solomon_ 3.1-4.
> 
> I drew on the actual rite and words of vassalage for their impromptu ritual (I didn’t invent the homoeroticism – it’s right there). I like the Lord/vassal model for a Dom/sub-like relationship, because it clearly expresses the vassal’s willing subordination as well as recognizing their power, and the kiss on the mouth (as opposed to a hand or a foot) shows the reciprocity of the relationship. It is the implicit (or explicit) model in much medieval courtly romance, with the Lady/Beloved taking the role of Lord and the knight the role of vassal. 
> 
> The inspirations for the unicorn tapestry in the guest quarters are The Unicorn in Captivity from The Hunt of the Unicorn and The Lady and the Unicorn. Both are from around 1500, but let’s assume they were based on earlier designs. Around the first decade of the thirteenth century, though, a wall hanging would be made of cloth embroidered with wool or silk.


	5. Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Armitage is torn between his desire for Kylo and his monastic vows. They travel to Rouen to receive new orders from Archbishop Snoke, and during an eventful journey, Kylo finds himself taking care of Armitage. Theology is discussed in bed.

**“Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.” ~ _Song of Solomon_ , 1:1.**

 

February turned to March, draining winter’s sere and bitter dregs. Hunger pried its sharp fingers between the monks’ ribs and stinging needles of sleet lashed the stone walls.

On Ash Wednesday even Kylo deigned to kneel among the monks of Mont-Saint-Ren. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” the abbot intoned, smudging crosses of burned palm leaves on their foreheads.

Behind him, the altar was draped in black and grey, its usual gold-embroidered fabric replaced with Lent’s austere cloth. Even the gem-encrusted reliquaries of the saints were muted in the light from the single beeswax candle. Above the altar, the statue of Christ was covered in sackcloth, hidden from view until Easter.

*

After mass, Armitage found Kylo reclining on a rug in front of his blazing hearth, reading from a volume of poetry. “Odi et amo,” he said to Saint Millicent, scratching under her chin, “I hate and I love. Why do I do this, perhaps you ask? I do not know, but I feel it happen and I am tortured.” The cat stopped purring long enough to bite.

“You don’t need to translate for her.” He put his hands on Kylo’s shoulders and reached down to place a kiss on his hair. “Her Latin is actually very good.” He dropped to the floor and took the book from Kylo’s hands. He flipped through its pages; it was a small volume of Ovid’s _Ars Amatoria_ – the _Art of Love_ – with a sprinkling of Catullus, Propertius, and some later works copied into the last pages.

“Pagan love poetry? Hardly appropriate Lenten reading, brother.” Armitage used what Kylo called his “abbot voice,” but his small smile gave him away. He leaned against Kylo, and Kylo wrapped one long arm about his shoulders.

“There are some Christian poems too.” He took the book back and it fell open to what was clearly a well-read passage. “Here’s Alcuin writing to his favorite bishop:

> _"I think of your love and friendship with such sweet memories, reverend bishop, that I long for that lovely time when I may be able to clutch the neck of your sweetness with the fingers of my desires…. how I would sink into your embraces,... how much would I cover, with tightly pressed lips, not only your eyes, ears and mouth, but also your every finger and toe, not once but many a time_."

Armitage tried to look disapproving, but Kylo would not be stopped. “Oh, this one's sweet too:

> _"Love has penetrated my heart with its flame,_  
>  _And is ever rekindled with new warmth._  
>  _Neither sea nor land, hills nor forest, nor even the Alps_  
>  _Can stand in its way or hinder it_  
>  _From always licking at your inmost parts, good father,_  
>  _Or from bathing your heart, my beloved, with tears._  
>  _Sweet love, why do you inspire bitter tears…"_

“And this is how you spend your hours of contemplation? Reading love letters a monk wrote to a bishop?”

“You should approve. Remember when I offered myself as your vassal?” Kylo nuzzled the abbot’s neck, “As _a man of mouth and hands_?” He rolled the official title suggestively in his mouth.

“I could hardly forget.”

“Well, there wasn’t a copy of the Gospels handy, so I swore the oath on this.”

“You swore an oath of fealty on the _Art of Love_? Which you just happened to be reading in bed? You really are a terrible monk.”

Kylo laughed and pulled Armitage to the floor with him, rolling the smaller man on top of him. Armitage straddled his hips and bent down to kiss him, tangling his fingers in his hair and grinding against him. Even through the thick wool of their robes, the motion sent sharp shivers of desire racing along his nerves.

“And you are a terrible abbot.”

“Don’t remind me,” he sighed and rolled off him, facing away.

Kylo enfolded the man’s curled body in his own. “Don’t be like that,” he whispered into his ear, gathering him in a loose embrace.

“I miss service, I ignore my duties, I neglect my flock, and I am constantly tempted by carnal pleasures.”

“I wish you would be more than merely _tempted._ ”

Armitage rolled over to look at him, watching the warm light flickering over his pale skin. He traced the ashen cross that he had earlier smeared onto the man’s forehead.

“It’s a season of renunciation. Of contrition, restraint, and abstinence.”

“So, what’s new?” the younger man asked with a hint of bitterness.

“Dilecte mi.” _My beloved_. He murmured, as a gentle reprimand and an apology at once. He ran his thumb over Kylo’s lips, brushing a little ash onto them.

“Domine mi.” _My lord._ Kylo, lowered his gaze, remembering his place.

Armitage was renowned for his intellectual precision and his eloquence, yet he could not draw out the tangled skein of his thoughts to explain his reticence. His heart warred with itself. His bone-deep yearning for Kylo collided with a lifetime of indoctrination, and the crushing certainty that to give himself to the other man meant to turn away from God and be damned. He leaned in to kiss Kylo. His lips tasted of burnt leaves and dust.

*

The ground was sodden and the wind was biting. Kylo was dressed in his knightly raiment, but for his helmet. The abbot, wearing a heavy traveling coat over his robes, followed him to the barn, his mood as dour as the weather.

The horses were in the pasture attached to the stable. The small chestnut gelding has his ears pinned back and was nipping at Upsilon’s hocks, chasing him around the paddock and squealing in rage.

Kylo laughed at the sight. “That’s why I call him Armie,” he said indicating the pony. “They always act like that, but I think they love each other really.”

“Would you shut up and get your damn horse? I’m freezing.”

“Bossy little pony,” Kylo said fondly, as he went to rescue Upsilon from his persecutor.

Even by horse, the journey to Rouen took two long days. They broke their journey at the turreted monastery of Saint-Étienne at Caen, where the monks welcomed them with a simple collation of bread and wine before bed.

Armitage was exhausted when they arrived at Rouen late the next night and hungry from the meager Lenten lunch of sardines. Even in winter, the stench of offal, rotting fish, and excrement rose from the city long before it came into sight. Upsilon tossed his head and picked up his hooves with exaggerated care as they crossed the sludge-filled stream that trickled past the city gates. The cathedral dominated the town. Struck by lightening, it had caught fire only a decade before. Now, spidery gothic spires emerged from the blackened wreckage, stabbing accusing fingers at the sky, as the archbishop created an even more grandiose testament to God out of its ashes. Armitage glowered at the pale and hulking monstrosity as they passed through the city gates and into its looming shadow.

He retired to his bed in the freezing guest dormitory and tried to get comfortable on the narrow straw pallet. He missed Saint Millicent and the linen sheets and even, he admitted bitterly, Kylo, who had been taken to a guest room befitting an aristocrat. This close to Snoke’s pale and watchful eyes, Armitage did not dare to seek out Kylo’s bed.

The next morning Snoke summoned them to his grand reception room. In deference to the Lenten season, if not its austerity, his robes, miter, and slippers were an ashen-lavender shade of silk, embroidered with silver crucifixes.

“My sons,” he greeted the men, peering down at them from his elevated throne.

“Your Grace,” they replied in unison.

“Our efforts at reforming monasteries and stamping out heretics are being rewarded. I have been called to the Consistory in Rome.” The aged prelate preened a little.

“Your _Eminence_ ,” Kylo addressed him as a cardinal and bowed. Armitage glared at his sycophancy.

“Not quite yet,” Snoke replied. He looked like a smug gargoyle.

“Before I leave, I want to outline the next phase of our war on heresy; with the pope’s blessing, it shall be a new crusade, not against the Saracens, but against the infidels who are nurtured in France’s very womb, and you, my dogs of war, shall command it. Kylo, you are to go among the people and show them the power of the First Order.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“You have heard of Brother Francis, in Italy? He does not stay cloistered in a monastery, but goes about performing miracles, preaching, and impressing the peasants with his _gentleness and humility._ ” The future cardinal sneered, showing what he thought of such virtues. Kylo nodded and Snoke continued. “I would have you be a second Francis, but in place of a friar’s sackcloth robes, I will dress you as a knight, and you will ignite not only wonder in the minds of the people, but also terror. We must not neglect the value of fear.”

“Would you have me preach, Your Grace?” Kylo sounded alarmed.

“No, do not preach, lest your path be mistaken for heresy or lead the ignorant astray; few can comprehend the power of God’s darkness. You shall bring the people to the First Order by your actions, not your words. And gather to yourself twelve followers, in imitation of Christ; choose the strongest and most violent of men to bend to our will. These shall be God’s own militia, the Knights of Saint-Ren.”

“As you say, Your Grace.”

“And you, my inquisitor,” Snoke turned to the abbot, “while Kylo brings the people to us, you shall snap at their heels, reminding them that the price of disobedience is torture, and the wages of sin are death. You are to oversee a new wave of persecution. Begin searching out and arresting heretics in preparation for public trial and execution.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

They left Snoke’s presence. Kylo headed to the cathedral’s _revestarius_ – the official in charge of clothing – to receive the new garments Snoke had chosen for him. Armitage loitered by the barn as the groom saddled Upsilon. “Hello revolting beast,” he greeted the horse. Upsilon broke free of the groom, backed his hindquarters toward Armitage and threatened to kick him. “You’re all show,” the abbot told him, “and probably a heretic.”

He glowered at the sky. The grainy blanket of cloud promised more snow. He disliked starting out so late, but he liked even less the idea of being trapped at Snoke’s cathedral by a storm. More than anything, he wanted to be warm and safe beside the fire in Kylo’s quarters at Mont-Saint-Ren.

They had barely made it half way to Caen when the first flakes started falling. “We should look for an inn,” Kylo said. Armitage squeezed his arms tighter around Kylo in agreement. The mud was icy beneath Upsilon’s hooves, and after he slipped and almost fell, Kylo dismounted to lead him. Armitage wrapped his traveling cloak tightly against the chill and held onto the saddle.

They were passing through a small village, with no visible inn or tavern, when a sudden movement caused Upsilon to startle, rearing up, and throwing his rider to the ground. Half a dozen figures in grey cloaks emerged from between the low brick buildings. “There he is!” a large man shouted, grabbing Armitage and dragging him away. The others rounded on Kylo, weapons drawn. Armitage kicked and struggled, but was unable to break free. “Kylo!” he yelled.

Kylo, meanwhile, had drawn his sword. Half a dozen men surrounded him, with their own short swords and daggers drawn. “Come on!” one man shouted. “We have the inquisitor. Let’s go!” Kylo bellowed with rage and sprang forth. He whirled through the falling snow, leaping and pivoting, slicing his blade cleanly through one man’s neck, stabbing a second in the chest, and barely pausing to disembowel a third. The fourth and fifth men he caught fleeing, flaying open one’s back with a single elegant stroke, and catching the other with a resounding blow to the back of the head.

Armitage watched, mesmerized by his skill and violence. Bright blood spattered over the freshly fallen snow as the knight spun and sliced and slashed, ending the men’s lives with a fierce feral joy. Surrounded by the dead and dying, he loomed over Armitage and his captor, blade raised. The man gibbered and sank to the ground, shielding himself with Armitage’s body.

“Release him,” Kylo gestured with his sword tip, digging it slightly into the man’s neck, “if you want to live.” Armitage staggered to his feet and stumbled to Kylo’s side. Kylo wrapped his left arm around the smaller man’s body, holding him tight.

“Who sent you?”

The man gibbered uselessly, and Kylo repeated his question, pressing harder against his jugular. “The Countess of Toulouse,” he babbled.

“Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, my lord.” The man groveled in the dirty snow.

“Then tell _the countess_ that the inquisitor is under my protection, and if she tries this again, I will come after her myself.”

“Yes my lord.” 

“Go!” Kylo ordered, and the man scrambled to his feet and scampered away.

Armitage’s heart was hammering against the inside of his chest like a caged beast. He took Kylo by his shoulders and pushed him against the wall of the nearest building, attacking his mouth. “You were _magnificent_ ,” he moaned into his neck between vicious bites as he pushed one leg between Kylo’s thighs. Kylo pulled him even closer and groaned into him.

“Love,” the knight murmured, “we really need to find an inn. There is no point in saving your life if you die of cold.”

*

They followed the hoof prints through the snow until they located Upsilon, who had broken into a barn and was standing among the cows eating their hay. Angry at being taken from his food and his new friends, he was even grumpier than usual as Kylo placed Armitageback into the saddle. Although it was only early afternoon, the sky was darkening. As the adrenaline wore off, Armitage started shivering. His hands and face became numb, and he imagined that Kylo’s feet must be even colder from trudging through the ankle-deep snow. The wind’s melancholy howl whipped the falling flakes around them, whiting out their vision, and only Kylo’s keen sense of direction kept them from wandering from the road into the blank fields where the earth smudged into the sky. They reached the town of Bec in the mid-afternoon and entered the muddy courtyard of the inn.

Kylo swung Armitage from Upsilon’s back. “Keep your hood up and let me do the talking,” he instructed as he unbuckled the saddlebags and handed the reins to a stable boy.

They entered a large room, dominated by a hearth and a long table. The floor was covered in rushes, and the sweetness of rose petals and lavender almost masked the sour scent of spilled ale.

Kylo addressed the innkeeper, a sturdy rubicund man with wispy grey hair. “My lady and I seek a hot meal and a room for the night.” Armitage glared from the darkness of his cloak. The innkeeper nodded and brought them plates of dried herring and mugs of ale. Armitage kept his hood over his face and they sat at one end of the table, away from the knot of travellers clustered near the fire.

“Ale, during Lent?” he asked, raising an eyebrow as Kylo  washed down a mouthful of warm greasy fish with a swig of the bitter drink.

“The fish must swim. Although I would kill for some mutton right now.”

After hastily saying grace, Armitage attacked his own food. The meal and the distant fire only warmed him a little and he shivered uncontrollably.

“We need to warm you up.” Kylo’s dark eyes were full of concern. He asked the innkeeper to send up warm water, linen towels, and hot spiced wine, then turned towards his companion and offered his arm to assist him up the stairs. “My lady,” he intoned graciously.

As soon as they entered the room, Kylo stripped off his bloody gloves and tunic and sank in front of the fire, prodding it with the iron and adding another log.

“Your lady, am I now?”  

“You have a delicate feminine beauty. Anyway, I wanted him to give us a room, rather than putting us in the men’s dormitory.”

Armitage took off his cloak and collapsed into a chair before the fire. Kylo laid his cheek against BArmitage’s knee.

The room was small and plain and the walls were stained with old wood smoke, but it kept out the winter storm. A knock at the door announced the arrival of the water, the towels, and the wine. Kylo set the tray beside the hearth and bolted the door. He dragged a small, shallow brass tub in front of the fire and poured the contents of the large pitcher into it. He knelt beside Armitage’s chair to remove his boots and socks, and then unbuckled the belt of his tunic and lifted it over his shoulders. “Stand up?” he asked gently. Armitage did so, clad only in his linen undergarments. He could feel the blush suffusing his face and spreading down his neck. He looked away, suddenly uncharacteristically shy.

“My lord.” Kylo took his chin in one hand and gently angled his face so they were eye to eye. “You always take care of me. Please let me take care of you.” He allowed Kylo to draw the undershirt over his head and to pull the braies from his hips and down his pale legs. He could not remember ever being naked in another’s presence.

Kylo’s eyes burned with a dark radiance as he took in Armitage’s slender form and guided him into the shallow bath. He handed him a cup of wine. Spiced with ginger, cinnamon, and cloves and sweetened with honey, it spread a tide of comforting heat through his torso and limbs. Kylo, sitting behind him, poured water from the pitcher over his shoulders. Warm rivulets ran down his chest and back. Gazing into the flames, he relaxed and the shivering subsided. He leaned back against Kylo’s bare chest.

“Better?” The man’s deep voice rumbled in his ear.

“Yes.” He turned his head, resting it against Kylo.

“What do you need, _domine mi_?” He ran his hands over Armitage’s chest and abdomen.

Shame mingled with arousal, each intensifying the other. His barely repressed longing for Kylo surged over him. He could hardly voice his terrible need. “Touch me?”

Kylo puffed softly against his neck as he slid his right hand down, splaying it across the small curve of his belly, while his left played across his chest. “Do you ever do this to yourself?”

“Never."

“I do it all the time.” Kylo nibbled on his earlobe as he inched his fingers incrementally lower. Armitage whimpered.

“Why am I not surprised?”

“I think of you,” he murmured wetly into his neck, “I think of you touching me. I think of you inside me.”

Armitage cried out as the large, calloused hand encircled his achingly hard cock. He squeezed his eyes shut as Kylo began working the shaft with a steady rhythm. The stimulation was overwhelming, blotting out all conscious thought. The cacophonous voices that had been yelling in his head for weeks were swept away in a tidal wave of pure feeling. For once he was not his mind, his intellect, his words, but a physical being devoured entirely by sensation. He threw his head back, gasping and thrashing, bucking into Kylo’s hand. Strung impossibly tight, so overwhelmed that the pleasure was almost pain, he screamed as the wave crashed over him and he fell, tumbling over and over into blackness, his voice drowned in the howling wind.

*

They dozed through the late afternoon as the storm raged outside. The abbot awoke to the distant sound of church bells through the gale. “Time for vespers?” Kylo asked.

“I think I’ll skip them this evening.” He smiled sleepily up at Kylo. He was a hundred miles from home, hidden away in a secret world where only he and the knight existed. Kylo rolled onto him and kissed him deeply, grinding slowly against him. Armitage felt him, hard and naked against his own tender flesh, and his recently sated desire stirred anew.  “You are a terrible influence on me. First I start missing services, and then I condemn myself to the flames.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Don’t you?”

“Not at all.” Kylo nuzzled his neck. “The God I know doesn’t punish us for the desires He gave us.”

“Next you’ll say He wanted Eve to eat the fruit.”

“Of course He did. Why else would He have given her free will while knowing _exactly_ how it would turn out? Anyway, how bored and lonely would he have been with a bunch of perfect humans living perfect lives in their stupid garden?” Kylo asked with a teasing smile, moving against him

“I thought your God was all darkness and mystery. What do you know about his inner life?”

“Not a thing. I don't even think He's a he."

“You’re such a heretic.”

“And yet you’re the one who burns.” Kylo punctuated his statement with a thrust that made Armitage whimper and then snaked his hand between their bodies to take them both in hand, and all thoughts of theology fled their minds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Odi et amo” is Catullus poem 87. It’s a perfect sentiment for Kylux (also for cats).  
> Alcuin (c. 735-804) was a court scholar of Charlemagne. Those are actual excerpts from his letters.  
> “Dilecte mi” (my beloved) (vocative case, grammar nerds) is the endearment used for the male beloved in the Latin vulgate translation of the _Song of Solomon_. “Domine,” (lord) is a usual way to refer to God.  
>  The justification for drinking alcohol when eating fish so “the fish can swim” goes all the way back to Petronius’s Satyricon.  
> And yes, Kylo did just “milady” Armitage. Also, I made up medieval room service. I have no evidence for that.  
> There is lots of controversy about whether monks wore underwear. It seems that some might have in colder climates and that they would certainly be loaned some (!!!) before leaving the monastery on business. [Here](http://imgur.com/qadWkTH) are some linen braies (underwear) from the thirteenth century.


	6. Chains of Gold, Inlaid with Silver

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Armitage and Kylo spend a day away from their usual responsibilities. Kylo reveals more of his past and Armitage worries about their future. Upsilon continues to be his usual self.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come and talk kylux to me on Tumblr! I am xanthippe-in-the-snow.

**"We will make thee chains of gold, inlaid with silver." _~Song of Solomon_ , 1:10**

Kylo and Armitage awoke, intwined, to the intense silence of a world transformed. The sparkle of snow-bright light sliced through the room’s small window. Armitage rose slowly from warm sleep. He was used, now, to waking in Kylo’s bed, but this morning felt different – the sharp light, the deep hush, the unfamiliar room, and the feeling of his lover ( _his lover_ ) entangled in his limbs. Until now he had been able to pretend ( _hypocrite_ , shouted his mind) that they were close, physically affectionate friends, like Augustine and Alypius or Jesus and Mary Magdalene, but he could  do so no longer. He had spent so long balanced on the precipice, now that he had actually fallen, a strange calm had settled over him, like the blanket of crisp snow on the town outside.

Kylo was watching him, his lips slightly parted and his forehead creased with concern, as though fearing rejection. Armitage reached for him, pulling him down against him into an open-mouthed kiss. Kylo hummed his pleasure into his ear, melting into him, pushing impossibly close, until there was no space between them.

“We should get up.” Armitage began disentangling himself from the sheets and Kylo.

“We’re not going anywhere today,” Kylo replied, squinting through the thick glass.

When they emerged into the day, it was clear that Kylo was right. They came out, blinking, into a world recast in white, blue, and gold. Three feet of snow covered the ground, and although the sun was already melting the hoarfrost from the tree branches, the roads were impassable. The usual bustle of a small town was absent, the silence broken only by the distant shouts of children laughing and the steady drip of melting snow.

“Do we really have to see the accursed beast?” Armitage grumbled as Kylo dragged him to the stable. “Couldn’t we spend the day in bed?” He blushed, surprised at his own boldness.

“Later. If Upsilon doesn’t get to run, he’ll be impossible tomorrow.” 

“He’s always impossible.”

“He loves the snow though.”

Kylo bridled the horse, who tossed his head and stamped even more than usual.  Armitage trudged along after them, through an alley and toward the unmarred expanse of the fields on the edge of town. He could see that Upsilon indeed loved the snow; the ridiculous animal had dropped his neck so he could push his muzzle into it, snuffling it as he walked, inhaling the powder and then snorting it out through his nostrils. His eyes were half closed in heavy-lidded bliss. When they reached the edge of the field, Kylo sprang easily onto Upsilon’s bare back. He reached down and scooped up a handful of snow and flung it at Armitage, hitting him in the shoulder.

“You are such a child!” Armitage shouted, packing his own snow into a hard ball before hurling it at the knight with all his strength. The projectile missed Kylo, but struck Upsilon’s flank, and the horse balked and wheeled away, kicking up clouds of powder in his wake, while Kylo, laughing, clung tightly to his mane.

Man and horse unfurled across the snow, a ragged silhouette like a raven in the pale dawn sky or ink spilling on fresh vellum. For all Armitage grumbled, he never tired of watching Kylo and Upsilon and the delight they took in their own wild strength. Finally exhausted, they returned to the edge of the field. Kylo slid, boneless to the ground and Upsilon took the opportunity to head butt him, sending him into a deep drift of snow. Kylo yelped, hooking his arm around Armitage’s waist and pulling him down with him. He grunted at the indignity. He had landed on his back with Kylo half on top of him. Snow was seeping down the back of his cowl. He braced his hands to push Kylo off him, but stilled. Kylo, cheeks red, hair dusted with half-melted water droplets, was looking down at him with a strange burning softness. Armitage closed his eyes against the tender intensity as Kylo took his face in his gloved hands and brought their lips together. He tugged at Kylo’s hair, pulling him harder into the kiss, turning it savage, trying to block out the terrible sweetness. Kylo on his knees before him, craving discipline, he understood. The lines between abbot and monk, between master and disciple were clearly drawn. This rising tide of inchoate feeling, though, could not be contained within such boundaries, and it terrified him. He sank further into the snowbank. Kylo’s radiant heat contrasted with the cold moisture seeping through his robes.

He finally pushed Kylo off him. “I’m getting all wet.” Kylo smirked in response.

“We should get cleaned up. I have plans for the afternoon.”

Armitage raised an eyebrow at that, but Kylo merely smiled. “Not that. I’m going to teach you to fight.”

*

“This is ridiculous,” panted Armitage, falling to his knees. "Monks don't use swords." The training weapon clattered against the wet cobblestones. Kylo had borrowed (Armitage presumed that meant _stolen_ ) a pair of wooden swords from someone in the town and had dragged him into the half-shoveled courtyard for instruction.

“You need to learn to defend yourself,” Kylo snarled, storming towards him as he scrambled to his feet.

“Why? Won’t my valiant knight protect me?”

“I might not be there next time the countess sends her hired thugs. You need to be able to defend yourself.”

Of course, thought Armitage, that was the unspoken reason for this lesson. Although Snoke had quartered his attack dog at Mont-Saint-Ren, he would now require him to traverse the countryside, recruiting knights and striking the fear of God into the faithful and heretical alike. Kylo would no longer be constantly at his side.

“Pay attention,” Kylo ordered, thrusting again. “Better,” he growled as Armitage evaded his blow and countered with one of his own, “but not good enough. Again!”

 

*

Armitage, aching with cold and exertion, sat by the fire, drinking mulled wine. His damp robes were draped over the other chair. Kylo sat on the floor between his legs, resting his head against the abbot’s linen-clad thigh.

“Who taught you to fight?”

“My uncle. After,” he paused, looking into the flames, “after my parents determined that the exorcists couldn’t help me, they sent me to his court as a page. They thought training as a knight might help.”

“It didn’t?” He passed the cup of wine to Kylo, who took a swig before continuing.

“My uncle was just another useless heretic and the other pages were scared of me. When I got angry things happened – windows broke, milk soured, fruit spoiled. They called me a witch.” This should have been a dangerous thing to say, thought Armitage, to the First Order’s inquisitor. He scratched small circles into Kylo’s scalp, encouraging him to continue. “I was good at it – good at the fighting anyway – but I didn’t want to be a knight. I didn’t want to marry, fight for the king, have sons, and then die – it all seemed so meaningless. And then Snoke found me, and he told me that I was like my grandfather.”

“How did he find you?”

“He had heard reports of a possessed boy that the priests couldn’t purify. I met him first in the fields outside the castle. I didn’t know he was an archbishop then. He just told me that he had known my grandfather, who had been a great mystic.”

“You never knew your grandfather?”

“My mother and my uncle refused to talk about him, but Snoke said that he had been like me, and that the voices I heard and the things I could do were evidence of God’s favor not possession. He said that he could train me to follow the unknown God like my grandfather. He showed me how to meditate to enter the divine darkness.”

“So, you left your uncle to follow Snoke?”

“Something like that. Snoke is not like my uncle. Snoke is wise.” He sounded uncertain. Kylo fell silent, his river of words run dry. It was the most he had ever told Armitage of his past. He had pulled himself away and he sat, hunched over, with his long arms wrapped tight around his knees. The orange flames danced in his glassy eyes.

Armitage had no idea what memories he was lost in or what war was raging in his mind, but he ached, as if Kylo’s anguish was his own. He was still unpracticed at empathy for another living human. It would be so easy to withdraw into himself, to read Augustine and work on Sunday’s sermon until he fell asleep in the chair, putting Kylo out of his mind. And yet, Kylo’s pain tugged at him, and he found that he did not _want_ to ignore it. “Dilecte,” he murmured, “mi amor.” He slid off the chair and drew close to Kylo, wrapping himself around the larger body, holding him tight, as he tried to puzzle out the source of his misery. “You didn’t want to fight for the king, but now you have to fight for Snoke, and it’s not so different after all. He’s using you, just as the king would.”

Kylo nodded. “I never swore an oath to Snoke. You are my only lord.”

The light had drained from the sky and only the fire illuminated their tiny room. The deep shadows accentuated the planes and hollows of Kylo’s face. A strange flame flickered in Armitage’s heart. This whole day, away from both the abbey and the cathedral, had been the first day of freedom he could recall, a magic bubble of time apart from the real world.

“Then come away with me. We don’t have to return to Saint-Ren.”   

“Where would we go?” Kylo sighed, but relaxed against him, molding himself to Armitage's form.

“I don’t know,” he confessed. Mont-Saint-Ren was his only home and he had never before let himself imagine leaving. “You could be a sword for hire. I could be an itinerant preacher.”

“You mean a heretic?”

Armitage snorted. “I would remain perfectly dogmatic in all respects.” That finally earned him a smile. Kylo twisted his neck, straining to meet Armitage’s lips. Armitage pulled him around into his embrace.

“Or we could live in a little village in Provence, where the winters are mild. We could raise ducks and grow lavender and Upsilon could help carry produce to market. I could tell everyone I was a widower and you were my idiot baby brother.” He leaned his forehead against Kylo’s, softening the insult with a small smile.

“Snoke would hunt us down, if the Church of the Force didn’t get to us first,” Kylo countered bleakly.

Armitage knew he was right, and even if they could elude Snoke and the heretics, and somehow pass themselves off as brothers, they had few skills and no resources. As a monk, he owned no property and he doubted that Kylo, alienated from his family, possessed more than his horse and his armor. Kylo had rebelled against his entire upbringing, but remained as resolutely trapped as Armitage.

“Come to bed, love.” Armitage stood and pulled Kylo to his feet and led him to the narrow pallet. The thought that they would be returning to Saint-Ren as lovers twisted a cold blade of dread in his belly. Surrounded by the watchful eyes of the monks with Snoke’s long shadow hanging over them, they would be in constant danger. He knew he should break from Kylo ( _if you truly love him_ , whispered the rational part of his soul, _you should send him away for his own protection_ ), yet he could not bear to. Kylo was the one thing he had ever wanted for himself, and he would not let him go. In the bed, he held him tight, the fears shared but unspoken. Kylo’s breathing evened out, and still Armitage lay awake, his thoughts spinning. The embers had died long before sleep found him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kylo’s unknown God whom the believer meets only in the darkness beyond all words and knowledge might sound heretical, but it is based on the mystical theology of the fifth- or sixth-century writer known as [Pseudo-Dionysius](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-dionysius-areopagite/).  
> Upsilon’s personality is an amalgamation of two actual horses I know. One is a huge Fresian cross (I envision Upsilon as something like a Fresian) – he is the one who does all the dangerous stuff I attribute to Upsilon. The other is a little dude of unknown parentage who is a complete smart ass and is almost untrainable, because he outsmarts all his trainers. He really does love snow.


	7. My belly trembled at his touch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spring comes to the abbey. Armitage feels his world changing as a result of his love for Kylo. Meanwhile, Kylo begins recruiting his apostles, the Knights of Saint-Ren. He captures an important heretic, but somehow, the prisoner holds all the power. Armitage’s relationship with Kylo becomes both more intimate and more complex, as he relinquishes control to his lover and begins to explore his own desires.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is torture-based flirtation in the chapter, discussion of torture devices, and highly inappropriate use of Augustine.

**“My beloved put in his hand through the opening, and my belly trembled at his touch.”** **_Song of Solomon_ ** **, 5:4**

The next morning dawned clear and mild, the sun melting the snow into muddy rivulets as Armitage, Kylo, and Upsilon set out for home. Armitage was still apprehensive about returning to the monastery with its watchful eyes, but he was overwhelmed by the buzzing warmth at his nearness to Kylo. After all, they had been sleeping in the same bed for weeks without anyone noticing and, as abbot, he was above the censure of his flock. A fine silver blade of worry twisted deep in his belly – he should be setting an example for his monks, not neglecting them for his lover – but he pushed the feeling away and wrapped his arms tight around Kylo’s waist, leaning into his broad, solid back.

Even Upsilon was in a good mood, snorting and prancing. He splashed his plate-sized hooves into puddles with unnecessary force, speckling his riders’ traveling cloaks with mud.

They rode west until the light became soft and rounded, and Mont-Saint-Ren appeared on the horizon, annealed against the sky. The incoming tide lapped at the stallion’s fetlocks as they crossed the sand to the citadel. It was almost dark when Kylo brushed Upsilon down and set him loose in his pasture. He galloped through the tattered gloaming, squealing in delight as the small copper gelding pursued him, nipping at his heels.

Kylo and Armitage made their way back to the abbey, their hands brushing. Kylo paused in the shadow of the gate, pushing him against the uneven stone wall and kissing him hard. He pressed a final kiss to his hair, bright in the dying light, before releasing him and stalking into the abbey alone. Armitagewatched him go, a tall, ragged shape torn from the night, before following a few feet behind.

Brother Dopheld yelped when he saw Armitage, and then ordered the novice on guard duty with him to summon the monks. As was customary after an abbot’s absence, the brothers assembled into a line to receive him, kneeling at his feet and kissing his hand. Armitage, tired from his journey, and eager to eat and sleep, processed down the line of reverent monks. Kylo had positioned himself last. His breath was hot on his hand and he darted out his tongue to lick between his knuckles. “Father,” he murmured, staring up at his abbot from beneath heavy lids.

*

Armitage fell back into the rhythms of the abbey. The inexorable Lenten season finally culminated in the Easter celebrations. The church was outfitted with gold-embroidered altar cloths and strewn with white lilies, and the brothers rejoiced as much for the end of the reign of salted cod as for the resurrection of their Lord.

Gentle breezes carried the loamy scent of the wakening earth. The first hint of green teased the branches of the willows. The bulbs Brother Dopheld had planted in the cloister garden thrust their snouts up through the soil and then burst into bloom, the riotous daffodils, followed by pink-purple-red tulips and the tiny bells of lily of the valley. The leaden sky lifted revealing white-streaked blue.

Armitage sat at his desk, noticing the way the light shone through the acid green of the new leaves. His senses were afire. Everything seemed sharper, brighter, and more alive. He felt as if up until now he had been reading a book, absorbing two-dimensional images traced onto yellowed parchment, and now, for the first time, he was thrust out into the dazzling sunlit world. He drank in the light of the lengthening days, celebrating the religious offices with a new and secret joy humming in his heart, and then, as often as he could, he retired to Kylo’s guest quarters to sleep entangled in his arms.

*

“Father,” Brother Phasmos, the prior greeted him, “may I have a word?”

“Of course.” He ushered him into his office. Phasmos bowed his head, barely fitting through the doorway, and sat on one of the spartan wooden chairs. The abbot seated himself opposite.

“It’s brother Dopheld, father. He is unhappy.”

It was the prior’s duty, to monitor the monks’ wellbeing, but it was unusual for Phasmos to bring such a matter to his attention.

“Sorrow is the path of the monk,” he replied, “we all offer contrition for our Lord’s suffering and death.” The words rang hollow in his ears.

Phasmos raised an eyebrow at the platitude. “He is more miserable than befits a monk. He cries himself to sleep every night. Since he looks up to you, I thought you might speak to him.”

He repressed a sigh.  “Very well.”

*

“Brother,” the abbot knelt down in the garden next to the young monk, “did you wish to talk with me?”

“No, father,” Dopheld focused on the pea seedling he was pressing into earth.

“The prior informs me you are unhappy.”

“No,” squeaked out the younger monk, “I am pleased to be of service to the Lord.” His voice quavered. His skin was almost translucent, stained purple under the eyes from lack of sleep. His lower lip quivered. Armitage had never noticed before how very young Dopheld seemed. He thought of this boy, torn away from his family, as he himself had been, and thrown among the rough-hewn care of monks. He wrapped his hand around Dopheld’s bird-boned wrist.

“Look at your abbot when he speaks to you.”

“I’m sorry, father.” His dark eyes shone in the early morning light.

“Dopheld, it is normal to be afraid, to feel alone here.”

“It is?”

He nodded. “This is a strange and difficult path that we walk. It is hard for all of us, even me. But God brought you here. He called you, because he looked into your soul and knew you were worthy.”

“Really, father?”

“Truly, my son, “ he squeezed Dopheld’s wrist. “You may doubt yourself, for that is humility, but do not doubt the Lord.” The words sounded trite to Armitage, so unsure now of his own vocation, but Dopheld gave him a hesitant smile.

“Thank you, father.”

Armitage rose from the garden and returned to his quarters, reflecting on the simple comfort he had given his monk. He had offered just a little of his own experience, implying that he was familiar with the aching loneliness of monastic life, but he couldn’t recall ever offering such solace to one of his flock.

*

Armitage and Kylo were kept busy with the archbishop’s assignments. Armitage sent spies to rout out heretics, while Kylo ventured into the hinterland, recruiting knights to follow him, performing miracles, and searching for the missing map. The abbot found himself craving Kylo’s presence and yearning for him as his frequent missions took him from the monastery.

As often as he could, Kylo took the abbot with him, stealing nights away at inns where no one knew their names.  On this particular night, they had found a room in dingy tavern outside Bayeux.

Armitage, clad in his long linen undershirt and braies, sat on the edge of the lumpy bed, a codex open on his lap; he always insisted on packing at least one book in the saddle bag, much to Kylo’s amusement.

“What are you reading?”  Kylo, lying on the bed, snaked an arm around his waist.

“Augustine.”

“Not City of God?” Kylo mimed an exaggerated shudder. “Too much theology.”

“No, Confessions.” He smiled at Kylo’s dramatics.

“Read to me?”

“Memories rush out in a horde, even though I want something different, throwing themselves at me as if to say ‘Are you looking for me?’ I brush them from the face of my memory with the hand of my heart, until at last the thing I want is brought to light, out of its secret place…”

“Not all that dry philosophical stuff. Read to me about Carthage. The good bits.”

He huffed – he loved Augustine’s meditations on memory – but flicked back through the book until he found the requested section. Kylo snuggled closer, laying his head in Armitage’s lap beside the book. “I came to Carthage, where a cauldron of illicit loves leapt and boiled about me. I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love, and from the very depth of my need hated myself for not more keenly feeling the need.”

Kylo nuzzled at his thigh and then rolled over, easing onto the floor beside the bed. “I like young Augustine. Keep going, _domine mi_.

“Because of all this, my soul was sick and became inflamed, and I sought to quench the burning with carnal things.”

Kylo seated himself between his knees, nudging them apart, burrowing his head beneath the book.

“What are you doing?”  Armitage's voice had turned breathy.

“Nothing young Saint Augustine would object to,” murmured Kylo, mouthing at the abbot through the shirt’s thin fabric. “Please don’t stop.”

Armitage rolled his eyes, but continued. “So I polluted the stream of friendship with the filth of unclean desire and sullied its clarity with the hell of lust.” He found it increasingly difficult to focus on the book’s cramped script.

Kylo pushed up the undershirt and wrapped his large hands around Armitage’s narrow hips, lifting him so he could pull his braies down with the teeth. He nipped and licked along the tender skin of his inner thighs.

Armitage gasped as Kylo’s hot breath landed on his exposed flesh and then whimpered as he licked slowly up his hardening length. He had heard of such things, of course –  in the novice’s dormitory, he had tried to block out the wet furtive sounds of the young monks enjoying each other’s bodies in the dark  – but he had always abstained from these _unnatural acts_ , imagining himself to be better and purer than those around him. Now he could not remember why. He pushed the book off his lap so he could tangle his hands in his lover’s long hair. Kylo gazed up at him, eyes filled with devotion. “Keep reading,” he murmured, nuzzling the junction of his thigh and groin. He tugged at Kylo’s hair, although he did not know whether he meant to stop him or urge him on. Kylo hummed and continued, wrapping his lips around him and drawing him into his mouth.  

“And I did fall in love, simply from wanting to,” Armitage whimpered, “ _O my God_.” The words came out as a whispered moan and not at all as Augustine had intended. His senses were overwhelmed, flooded with white-hot bliss and he struggled to continue reading. “I was loved and our love was consummated…” Kylo leaned his head back, opening his throat and swallowing around him, “and I wore my chains with bliss….” he was unable to continue, bucking into Kylo’s mouth, pulling hard at his hair as he came, moaning, down his throat.

*

“You realize I’ll never be able to use Augustine in a sermon again?”  They were lying entangled on the scratchy sheets, Armitage drifting and sated.

“Thank God for small mercies.” Kylo bit his neck and snuggled into him.

 

*

Kylo converted people to their cause, interrupting the empty words of the heretics and the powerless local priests, striding into their public gatherings to lay hands on the sick and possessed. His reputation preceded him and the crowds parted for the imposing black-clad knight. Armitage watched from the sidelines, a hood pulled over his head, as his lover channeled the power of his dark God.

Kylo scowled and stripped off his gloves, throwing them to the ground as he strode away from the town square. “What’s wrong?” Armitage hastened to catch up to him. “Leprosy,” he snarled dismissively, “again.” Curing such commonplace maladies was useful for the First Order’s reputation, but it left Kylo frustrated. He was searching, like Snoke before him, for a malaise that portended spiritual gifts.

“Wait,” he stilled Kylo with a hand on his shoulder. The crowd in the square had not dispersed following the leper’s miraculous healing. Instead, a middle-aged woman had stumbled forward, dragging with her a pallid youth. He lolled against her, twitching, seeming unaware of his surroundings. The aging parish priest, so recently disgraced by Kylo stepped forward to lay a palsied hand on the boy, who recoiled from the contact and hissed. “Interesting,” Kylo muttered, striding back into the fray.

The priest withdrew as Kylo stomped into the center of the square. The abbot sidled to the front of the crowd, eager to watch. The woman had deposited the boy on the ground and he lay there, wide eyed and trembling. Kylo knelt in the dust. He reached his bare hands out to cup the boy’s face.

“Don’t be afraid,” his voice was deep and soothing, “I feel it too.”

The boy, still shaking, stared into Kylo’s eyes.

“It’s terrifying, isn’t it?  Things happen outside of your control. Do they tell you you’re possessed?” The boy nodded.

“But these are not demons inside you, I can tell,” Armitage had to strain to hear him, “but angels.” The boy, still now, stared at him, unblinking, “and angels are terrifying creatures – all wings and wheels and fire. A thousand eyes and swords bright with blood. They need a strong vessel to contain them.”

He stroked the boy’s cheek. Armitage felt his stomach clench at the sight of his beloved’s hands so gentle on another. “I can teach you. I can make you strong enough. Do you want that? I can show you how to withstand this force, to channel it, to _revel_ in it.”

Kylo and Armitage walked back to Saint-Ren, the weakened boy – Thanisson – hunched over in Upsilon’s saddle. The horse seemed as little pleased with the situation as the abbot. He exhibited his fellow feeling with the abbot by only trying to bite him once. Kylo, though, was elated. “Do you know who this is?”  His face broke into one of his rare and beautiful smiles.

“No idea.”

“The best of my knights.” He slashed at some undergrowth with his sword as he walked, seeming unaware of his lover’s simmering mood.

*

Kylo had, in addition to the young page, recruited five other knights – disillusioned swords for hire, seeking to reconcile their piety with their lives of violence. Kylo offered them a solution – to fight for God, rather in defiance of His commandments.  The Knights of Saint-Ren, as they were called, were billeted in the village below the monastery, since the abbot had refused to house such ruffians within the cloister walls. The archbishop, he noted, had spared no expense outfitting them, even as the monastery itself needed extensive repairs. Thus, his mood was sour as Kylo dragged him down the hillside to meet his new religious military order, mounted on their steeds and arrayed on the shining sand.

They were impressive, Armitage conceded, and intimidating, attired in matching armor, the First Order’s insignia picked out in white and dark red on the backs and sleeves of the long tunics they wore over chain mail hauberks. They loomed over him, except Thanisson. Each knight had been equipped with a black charger, similar to Upsilon and it was clear that Kylo’s horse was none too pleased, pinning his ears and baring his teeth at the newcomers. One of the steeds screamed and lunged at him in response. Upsilon startled and scooted backwards, attempting to hide behind Kylo and Armitage. Kylo laughed.

“These are my knights,” he informed Armitage, indicating the men, who bowed their helmeted heads toward the abbot.

“Do they have names?”

“Not yet – not new names befitting their life as knights of Saint-Ren. The horses do though. This is Theta,” Kylo indicated one of the massive stallions, “this is Psi, this is Zeta, this is Nu, here is Iota – we named him that because he’s smaller,” Kylo indicated Thanisson’s steed, “and this is Capsilon.”

“Capsilon? That isn’t a Greek letter.”

“Look, not all of us have such extensive Classical educations,” snarled the burly knight mounted on that horse, “ _Father_.” The abbot considered it wise to let the point drop. He stood alone, buffeted by the wind, and watched the knights galloping like fragments of shadow across the shining sand.

*

Armitage sometimes accompanied Kylo on his expeditions hoping to find leads on the heretics. The men and, worse yet, women they found preaching in the town squares were unimportant – useless peons who had been inspired by whisperings about the Church of the Force, but who had no knowledge about its workings or its hierarchy. The few that he had dragged back to Saint-Ren had been a waste of time, yielding no information on the rack. Weak-minded imbeciles, he knew from experience, would tell you anything to stop the pain.

Armitage shoved a battered prisoner out the monastery’s back door. It was not like him to let a putative heretic go, yet this senile man – barely qualified to be a village idiot – was not even useful enough for a public burning. Armitage needed one of the false church’s priests; first he would flay his secrets like flesh from his bones, and then he would hold a public spectacle – a feast for visiting dignitaries, a procession, and a burning – that would cast fear into the hearts of peasants and heretics alike.

*

Hearing the shouting, the abbot hastened to the front gate. Two of the Knights of Saint-Ren stood in the doorway, blocking out the light, while Kylo dragged a short, well-built man into the monastery.

“Caught you one!” he announced proudly, sending the captive sprawling to the floor. The man glowered at them. He wore a soft leather tunic, embroidered with a red silk phoenix and black breeches. He was well nourished and his handsome features were familiar. Armitage regarded him with rising alarm.

“Kylo, you idiot, this is no peasant.”

Kylo shrugged, unconcerned. “You said you needed someone more important.”

“Important?” screeched Armitage. “Important? This is the nephew of the Duke of Castile, one of Snoke’s greatest allies.”

“I know who he is,” Kylo sulked, “but he’s still a heretic.”

“I don’t want a heretic _prince_ , you idiot,” he snapped. “Do you think his uncle wants him tortured by the First Order? Do you think Snoke wants that? There will be hell to pay.”

The prisoner smirked up at the abbot. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lord Inquisitor.” His dark eyes sparkled with humor. Armitage had the disquieting sense that, although this man was their captive he held all the power. “You have such a reputation. I was hoping you might introduce me to some of your toys.” He smiled lasciviously.

Armitageturned away and gestured to the monks on guard duty. “Take him to a cell. Give him water. Have two men guarding him at all times.” He stalked away ignoring Kylo’s hurt look.

*

Armitage marched down to the dungeons in a foul mood. He had slept fitfully in his own quarters, too enraged by Kylo’s idiocy to join the knight in his room. He had sent one of his men down ahead of him with orders to prepare the prisoner, and as he entered the large round chamber, he saw the guards tying the shirtless man to the rack.

The prisoner arched his back as his wrists and ankles were bound to the device. The guards had stripped him of his shirt and tunic. Armitage tried to ignore how his solid bronzed abdomen, limned by the flickering torch light, glimmered with the faintest sheen of sweat. Even bound this man – Poe of Castile – looked like a sculpture of a Greek god. “Turn him over,” the abbot ordered the guards.

Poe huffed out a laugh. “Should have known you’d want me from behind. Still,” he looked over his shoulder as the guards manhandled him into position, “if I’d known the inquisitor was so pretty, I might have got myself captured earlier.”

“We’ll extract your confession and then drop your corpse in a sewer for the rats,” he sneered, ignoring the blush rising in his cheeks.

“That plan might work except that an entire village saw your oh-so-dramatic knight pluck me up and carry me off like a princess from the middle of a town square _in broad daylight_. I imagine my uncle already knows where I am.”

Armitage paled at the thought of a duke arraying his armies against Mont-Saint-Ren. “Is he so keen to reclaim his heretic heir?”

“Blood is thicker than communion wine,” Poe smiled smugly, “at least where I’m from. So, perhaps you can find me innocent of all charges and quietly let me go.”

“You know I can’t do that.” It would be an unbearable admission of error for the inquisitor to release a high profile heretic.

“In that case, we should at least enjoy our time together. Which of your play things are you going to use?” He eyed the approaching abbot with open disdain. “A cat o’ nine tails? How trite.”

“Don’t get complacent, infidel. This is just to warm you up.”

The metal-tipped thongs whistled through the air and cracked as they bit into the solid flesh of the man’s torso. Poe moaned as the blows striped his back, reminding Armitage of Kylo’s responses to discipline. He willed the thought away, forcing his eyes away from the prisoner’s sweat-damp hair, broad shoulders, and muscular thighs. He took a steadying breath and cursed Kylo for ruining him. Surely interrogations never used to affect him this way.

Kylo had entered the chamber, observing from the shadows. Now his boots rang loud on stone as he strode across chamber and grabbed Armitage’s arm, restraining the flogger mid-swing.

“Father, might I have a minute of your time?” he hissed, dragging Armitage to the far side of the dungeon.

“What is so important that you interrupt my work?”

Kylo leaned in close, stroking the flogger’s bloodied tails. “The prisoner’s flirting with you.”

“Are you jealous?” he asked, soft and acid. His pulse was pounding just beneath his skin.

“Of course I am. How long is it since you put me on the rack?”

“And whose fault is that? You’ve been too busy training your baby-faced page and that bunch of thugs you call knights.”

“Don’t be like that,” Kylo whispered, one hand, still gripping his upper arm, “I miss you.” His tone was so earnest that some of Armitage's anger drained away. He leaned in, breath hot in Armitage's ear. “Maybe later we could use some of these beauties.” He inclined his head toward the array of torture devices.

“They’re quite lethal.”

“Even this one?” Kylo ran his hand over the ovoid metal of the Pear of Anguish. “It looks fun.”

“First it goes inside you,” he murmured, “and then you open it.”

Kylo raised an eyebrow. Armitage shook his head. “Don’t get any ideas. It’s a punishment for sodomites. No one survives long.”

“I guess you don’t want to kill me after all.”

“Only somewhat.”

“What about this one?” Kylo indicated a bronze pyramid over which hung a rudimentary harness.

“The Judas Cradle. It’s covered in oil and you hold yourself just above it for a long as you can, until your arms give out. Also called the Nightwatch, because if you fall asleep you’ll be impaled.”

Kylo shivered. His pupils were large and glassy in the low light.

“If you two have finished whispering sweet nothings, could we get on with it over here?” Poe interrupted. “This martyrdom’s not going to happen on its own.”

Armitage took a deep breath, suddenly recalling where he was. He felt cold and clammy beneath his robes, hard and wanting and nauseous. “What are we going to do with him?”

“I’ll fix it,” Kylo said ominously. “Leave it to me.”

*

Armitage rushed through the liturgy of the night office and then hurried to the guest quarters, the monks’ breathy chanting chasing his footsteps through the hallways. He was surprised to find the guestroom empty. The fire had burned down in the grate and the gibbous moon’s blue tide washed across the floor. The great tapestry was lost in shadow, but for the unicorn, glowing in the low light. Millicent opened one bored golden eye in greeting. He shooed her off the bed and stood beside it, his hands shaking as he untied his belt and pulled off his habit. All day he had been painfully distracted by thoughts of the prisoner and by Kylo’s possessive ardor. For weeks now he had felt like a crossbow drawn tight – awaiting only a sharp flick of fingers to release the bolt – and the day’s events had wound him impossibly tighter, ready to snap.

A gust of night air and Kylo blew into the room smelling of rain, loamy earth, and burning green branches. He embraced Armitage from behind, wrapping him in his large arms, and kissing his neck. Armitage subsided into him, inhaling his strange scent.

“My dove, my perfect one” the knight murmured, “my lily among the thorns, what do you need from me?”

He groaned, his usual eloquence deserting him. “Everything.”

Kylo released him, sitting to remove his boots. He stripped off his leggings and his tunic, dropping them on the floor. He turned to Armitage, and pulled his undershirt over his head. Since they were at home in the abbey, Armitage wore no braies. He shivered, feeling exposed in the sharp light, his naked body as pale and thin as the crescent moon. Kylo knelt before him, bowed his head, and kissed his hands, reminding him of their vow. “You haven’t done this before.”

“Of course not.” He didn’t mean to sound so petulant. “I take it you have.”

“Knights in training are popular with village girls. And boys.”

“I imagine,” he said sourly.

“It was nothing like this.” Kylo pressed another open-mouthed kiss to his hand and stared up at him. “You are my Lord in all things. Let me do this for you.”

Armitage touched his upturned face, tracing his cheekbones and lips with hesitant fingers, and nodded.

Kylo lay back  on the sheets and reached for his lover. Armitage lay next to him, on his back staring into the darkness. As abbot, as inquisitor, he was used to having power over others and control of himself, yet now he felt cracked open, like a deer’s warm carcass broken apart to feed the hounds.

“Which way do you want to do this?” Kylo asked, his voice low in the darkness.

“I imagine both condemn my soul equally to hell.”

Kylo stroked a strand of hair behind his ear. “Heaven and hell are fairytales men like Snoke tell us to make us obey.”

“You know better than the theologians, I assume?”

“I saw this in the darkness: God is a great fire, and we are tiny sparks cast into the night sky. That’s why life hurts so much, because we are alone in the dark, away from the fire for just one moment before we fall back into the flames.”

“If there is no heaven and no hell, then what is the point of all this? What are our lives for?” He felt as though he balanced on the edge of a precipice, beneath him an endless void.

“To burn as brightly as we can.”

“You’re such a heretic.”

“But you love me, _scintilla_ , my little spark.” Kylo rolled on top of him, supporting his weight on his elbows, then lowering himself onto his lover. Armitage was overwhelmed by Kylo’s weight, his size, the smooth solid heat of his body. He was aware of his own ragged breathing and his erratic pulse fluttering like a trapped bird inside his skin.   

“Do you trust me, _domine mi_?”

“Yes.”

Kylo kissed him softly, and he felt some of the tension ebb. The man’s calloused hands roamed over his flanks, soothing and arousing in equal measure. He kissed his neck, nipping and licking his way across the sharp clavicles and narrow chest. Armitage watched the flex of his muscles as he bent to kiss his way down his torso. Kylo loomed over him now, curved and powerful, like a predator poised for the kill. He looked like a marble incubus, who would slip in on the moonlight to ravish a maiden in her bed. Armitage reached up and ran his fingers over Kylo’s ribs, his touches tremulous. Kylo purred in response, and Armitage grew bolder, stroking and grasping, wishing to return his overflowing affection. Eventually, he pulled his lover down on top of him. Kylo’s thigh was between his own and, now fully hard, he arched up against him, rutting into him, his desire engulfing his shame.

Kylo stood, running his hand down Armitage's body, as he went, bending to brush a dry kiss to the sole of his foot, before going to rummage in the wooden trunk at the end of the bed. Armitage whimpered at the night air, cold against his damp flesh.

“Patience, my Lord.” Kylo returned holding an ornate glass bottle and straddled him. He uncorked the vessel and dribbled the liquid onto his fingers. Armitage caught the peppery grass scent of olive oil and a resinous golden hint of myrrh. A single droplet of the warmed fluid landed on his belly and then another. Armitage watched, mesmerized by Kylo’s large shining knuckles, until one of those hands reached down to envelop him. Kylo stroked him with excruciating slowness, while he reached behind himself with his other hand. It took Armitage a minute to realize what he was doing, working his fingers into himself.

Kylo bent over and nipped at his jaw. “This way will be easier, the first time.”

Armitage clenched his fists into the sheets, writhing beneath Kylo’s attentions. His skin was alight and he was filled with a feral keening need. Kylo stilled, poised above him. Armitage reached for his thighs, raking his fingernails across the muscular flesh. Then Kylo sank onto him, engulfing him, and all thought was gone.

Kylo kissed him, slow and messy. His eyes, his crooked nose, filled Armitage's entire vision. Kylo consumed and surrounded him and they moved together, Kylo setting the cadence, arching his spine and throwing back his head as he rode him.

Armitage felt his rhythm stutter and break and Kylo paused and then wrapped his arms around him and rolled them over. Kylo’s hair fanned out across the sheets like a dark halo. Armitage felt a wave of fierce possessive joy that this beautiful creature beneath him was his, and his alone. _Dilectus meus mihi, et ego illi --_   _My beloved is mine and I am his_. He had longed for Kylo since he had first laid hands upon him, and even before, not knowing the name for the inchoate yearning in his soul. For this man, he had broken his vows and forsaken his faith. He had given up the promise of eternity for salvation here on earth, and he felt no regret. He framed his face with his hands and kissed him savagely, thrusting into him with a newfound frenzy. Kylo moaned, wrapping his legs around his waist and urging him on, faster and harder. They were no longer men, but angels and animals, unfallen, outside of time. Moments later, too soon, BArmitage was lost, gasping into Kylo’s neck, biting out his name as he came, and seconds later Kylo followed.   

Armitage collapsed onto his lover, sticky, boneless, and spent. He protested weakly as Kylo rolled out from underneath him. He returned with the pitcher of water and a linen cloth. Armitage was almost asleep as Kylo cleaned them both up and then returned to bed.

“You have ruined me, destroyed me utterly, _dilecte mi_.” Armitage's voice was muffled as he burrowed into Kylo’s shoulder.

“Then I’ll bring you back to life.”

*

Armitage shoved his head under the goose-down pillow, but the knocking became louder.

“Father,” an urgent voice called.

He stumbled out of bed, pulled on his undershirt, and opened the door.

Phasmos stood outside, a burning torch in one hand. “The prisoner has escaped.”

The abbot was used to awakening in the night for the offices, and the world sharpened about him. As it did he realized that he was standing almost naked, reeking of sex and oil, in the doorway of Kylo’s guest room.

“How did you know I was here?”

Phasmos rolled his eyes, the whites gleaming in the flickering light. “I’m the prior. I know everything. But what matters now is the prisoner.”

“How did he escape?” No one had ever got out of the dungeons, which were carved into the rock below the abbey.

“Brother Finnian must have helped him. He’s gone too. They’ll be well inland by now.”

“I ordered there be two guards at all times.”

“Brother Kylo dismissed the second guard after Nocturnes and relieved the night watchman of his duties. I only became aware of the prisoner’s absence when I checked the cells on my night rounds.”

“Why does everyone obey Brother Kylo’s orders?” He fumed. “He’s not the abbot.”

“He is the archbishop’s man, Father.”

Armitage exhaled, the fight going out of him. He was suddenly aware of how cold the floor was beneath his feet. “Speak to no one of this. Any of it.” He gestured at the guest room where Kylo’s shadowy form was visible in the bed.

“Of course not, Father.”

He bolted the door and returned to bed. “Hnnnnnh,” said Kylo as Armitage elbowed him in the ribs.

“You allowed the prisoner to escape,” he hissed. “You practically escorted him from the abbey. And Brother Finnian’s gone with him.”

“Mmmmmmm,” agreed Kylo, not opening his eyes. “I told you I’d solve the problem,” he mumbled reaching for him. He sounded both smug and sleepy. “Finnian was miserable, and he was a terrible monk. The abbey’s better off without him, and this way you don’t have to kill Poe or let him go.”

“So I just look incompetent instead?” He fumed.

“Come here and stop complaining.” Kylo grabbed at him again.

He was irritated but also cold, so he let Kylo enfold him. “Brother Phasmos knows about us.”

“I wouldn’t worry. He’s sympathetic.”

“Is he like us?”

“Not exactly, but he has some secrets of his own.” Kylo’s voice was muffled, as sleep dragged him under.

Armitage knew his well-ordered life was spinning out of control. A prisoner had escaped, a monk had revolted, and it seemed that their relationship was an open secret. He knew he should be afraid, but he felt safe within the cradle of the knight’s arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to neon_bible for being an awesome beta and helping so much.
> 
> If you haven't already, look at schaloime's [amazing illustration of the scene from chapter 4 where Kylo swears fealty to Armitage.](http://i.imgur.com/ooSaJGy.png)
> 
> The quotations from Augustine’s Confessions, book 10, chapter 8; and book 3, chapter 1, are adapted from the translation of F.J. Sheed (Hackett, 2006). “My dove, my perfect one … my lily among the thorns” is from Song of Songs 6.9 and 2.1. Dilectus meus mihi, et ego illi is 2.16.  
> The Pear of Anguish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pear_of_anguish) and the Judas Cradle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_cradle) were probably not real medieval torture devices. See Chris Bishop, “The Pear of Anguish: Torture, Truth and Dark Medievalism,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 17.6 (2014), pp. 591-602.  
> Individuals assigned female at birth who lived and passed as monks are a documented phenomenon of the Middle Ages. Phasmos, in this work, is one such monk.


	8. Put Me as a Seal Upon Your Heart, for Love is as Strong as Death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Armitage and Kylo's idyll comes to an end as Armitage is captured and forced to confront the sins of his past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **CONTENT WARNING FOR THIS CHAPTER**. There is torture (not the fun kind), psychological breakdown, and some pretty extreme sacrilege. If you would prefer to skip over this chapter, there is a synopsis in the notes at the end. You can scroll down and read that as a bridge to the next chapter.

**“Put me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death.” ~** **_Song of Solomon_ ** **, 8.6-7.**

 

Armitage woke screaming for air. A rough hand was clamped over his mouth, and another grasped his throat. He grabbed at them, trying to free himself. He bit down hard on the hand covering his mouth, and forced out a muffled scream.

“Hush now, little abbot,” said a rough, accented voice, “no point making it worse on yourself.” A second set of hands grabbed his wrists, and a third his ankles. He struggled, silently cursing Kylo’s absence – if only his lover had been here, sleeping in arm’s reach of his sword, he would have stood a chance, but Kylo was away recruiting for the Knights of Saint-Ren. His skull smacked against the stone wall and his vision filled with inky darkness.

When he awoke again, it was to a world of thin-stretched shadows. His throat was parched and he nearly overturned the cup of water, scrabbling to pick it up. It tasted foul, but he drank it all.  Only then did he become aware of the pain in his throat and limbs, and of the deep gnawing hunger in his belly.

A rusted iron shackle clamped around his right ankle was connected by a chain to a bolt in the floor. A designated dungeon then. _Think_ , he told himself, _think_. He could not tear himself free from his shackles – physical strength had never been his forte – but he could still use his mind.  He had been taken from his own abbey. The night watch should have raised the alarm, yet he had heard nothing. Someone could have paid off the guards, of course, but he could not believe that brother Dopheld, who had been on sentry duty, would have betrayed him. So, either the invaders had silently dispatched the guards – and Armitage refused to believe that – or the guards had willingly let someone they knew and trusted into the abbey.

Had his assailants chosen a time when they knew Kylo would be absent, recruiting knights far afield? Did they know that he habitually slept in Kylo’s bed?  Was this his punishment for his transgressions?

A high, tiny window let in a sliver of grainy light. Dusk was long and blue-purple – he was still in the north then, not so far from home, but the air had no tang of salt and he could not hear the cry of gulls. Faintly, over the dungeon’s stale odor, he smelled the fetid stench of a city. He put the pieces together: he was in a northern inland city, and the walls were made from blocks of pale golden limestone  – he was in Rouen, and therefore his captor must be Snoke.

He was still dressed in the large undershirt in which he had slept. In a moment of unbearable sentimentality, he had borrowed one of Kylo’s. It was made of a finer linen than his own, and the man’s smell clung to it faintly.

 _Kylo, Kylo_ , he called in his mind. Several days must had passed since his abduction, judging by his hunger. By now, Kylo would have returned to Mont-Saint-Ren. Kylo would come for him. He had to believe that. He curled up, his head on his own arm, inhaling the man’s scent, and imagining that he was here with him.

*

He opened his eyes. A pointed silk slipper, crimson with gold brocade, incongruous in the dust, came into focus. “Archbishop,” he croaked, heaving himself into a seated position.

Snoke towered over him. “ _Cardinal_ ,” the gaunt man corrected. In the cell’s dim light, his robes were the color of dried blood.

“My apologies, your Eminence.”  Such social niceties seemed ridiculous in this situation. When had Snoke returned from Rome?  Had he returned merely to depose Armitage?

“My child,” whispered Snoke, “how you have disappointed me.” He took a step back and a guard rushed in with a wooden chair for him.

“I am sorry, Your Eminence.”  He kept his eyes lowered in a show of contrition.

“I made you the youngest abbot of Saint-Ren. You were my my most fierce inquisitor, and now I find you guilty of,” he paused and then spat the word, “ _fornication_ with my knight.”

“Your Eminence, it is not what it looks like."

“SILENCE! Flithy sodomite! You will listen to what I propose, and you will not speak until invited” Armitage nodded and the cardinal continued. “As you know, I have grand ambitions for the First Order, and for Christendom itself. My reputation has been built on purifying our mother church through reforms and persecutions. And yet, now I find corruption within the very heart of my Order. You can only imagine the scandal it has brought upon me, particularly at this delicate time, when the Pope’s health is so fragile.” Armitage understood: Snoke was accusing him of imperiling his papal ambitions. A tight fist of dread clamped around his heart. _He will make me a scapegoat_ , he thought, _he will make me a torch to cast out every shadow of doubt_.

“As I’m sure you understand,” Snoke continued, as though this were a reasonable discussion between churchmen, “I must be seen to stamp out the putrefaction with utmost severity.” Armitage remained silent, but inside his head he screamed again for Kylo, as though the man might hear his thoughts.

Snoke heaved an exaggerated sigh and contorted his face into a grimace that could perhaps be construed as sympathy. “You and Brother Kylo were valuable assets to the Order. I am a merciful man, and I do not wish to lose you both, but one must be sacrificed to silence my enemies. If you make a public confession stating that Kylo seduced you by sorcery, you will be assigned a penance and released. After an appropriate probationary period, I will reinstate you as abbot and inquisitor. Will you make the confession?”

 _Snoke’s lying_ , he thought. The manuals on witchcraft stated that it was acceptable to falsely promise leniency. _He’s lying because he wants me to disavow Kylo, but why?_ “It’s not true. He didn’t use witchcraft.”

“Really, Armitage, can you be so sure of that? What else would have led a man of God like yourself into such debauchery? You have seen evidence of Kylo’s diabolical nature, have you not?  I thought it could be tamed in service to the Order, but I was wrong. There's too much darkness in him.”

“What will happen to Kylo?”

“After a trial, he will be publically burned. _You_ will burn him as evidence that he has no more hold over you or the First Order.”

“And if I refuse to confess?”

“As you know, the Order can be very persuasive. Or perhaps _your beloved_ will choose to make his confession first, in which case it is you who shall burn as a witch--  or maybe I will hang you in a cage to starve, as befits a sodomite priest.” Snoke rose from the chair with a fluid grace that belied his age. Just before he reached the door, he craned his head toward Armitage. “Do think about it, my son.” And then, in a susurration of silk, the old man was gone.

Mad panic, like a king tide, threatened to drown him. _Think_ he told himself again, _think_. He was sure Snoke was lying, but why? If they had brought scandal down upon the First Order, then why would it be in Snoke’s interest to save one of them? Surely it would be better to make a very public demonstration of the Order’s purification, by burning both the culprits. It was what he, as inquisitor, would have done.

Even if Snoke had decided, out of pragmatism, to save one man at the expense of the other, surely, _surely_ , he would choose Kylo. Men like Armitage – trained since birth, dogmatic, unyielding, mindlessly devoted – were not so rare. Certainly, he had a keen grasp on theology, an incisive strategic mind, and a talent for rousing speeches, but all that paled in comparison with Kylo’s spiritual gifts. Kylo could heal the sick and sometimes see into people’s minds. The rhythms of nature were swayed by his hand. With the right rhetoric, he could be the Order’s first saint. He was a far greater asset to Snoke than Armitagewould ever be.

It would make far more sense to force a confession from Kylo, saving him and condemning Armitage. So, either Snoke doubted that he could elicit one from Kylo or he did not have Kylo at all, in which case he needed Armitage’s confession to discredit him and condemn him _in absentia_. A tiny ember of hope glowed in his chest.

*

“It’s unfortunate,” noted Armitage, “that the Order’s best inquisitor is indisposed. He is much more effective than you oafs.”

The guard backhanded him, his meaty hand colliding with the already broken nose, sending a blinding meteor of pain through his skull.

With the help of an assistant, the torturer secured him face down to the rack and turned the wheel a quarter revolution, stretching his body tight (but not too tight, Armitage noted – they would not kill him yet). This rack sported an innovation that the inquisitor in Armitage could appreciate – it held him barely suspended above a bed of small iron spikes, so if he relaxed or flinched his skin would be pierced in hundreds of places. He scrunched his eyes closed and turned his head to the side, feeling the vicious points graze his cheek.

As the torturer beat him with the iron-tipped flogger, the sounds – the creaking wood, the whoosh of the strands through the air, and the wet slap of leather on flesh –  took Armitage back to his sessions with Kylo. He thought of how much Kylo loved the freedom of being bound, how for him the line between pain and pleasure became blurred until it dissolved completely. He did not, under normal circumstances, appreciate pain. He enjoyed inflicting suffering, not receiving it, but recalling his lover stretched out in ecstasy, floating high on a sea of pain, he felt a deep wave of comfort.

 _Kylo_ , he called in his mind, _show me how_. He imagined that he was curling up inside Kylo’s chest, his mind shaping itself to the outline Kylo’s mind, like a copy of a map, tracing the odd looping progression of Kylo’s thoughts. The torturer was still raining blows over his back, buttocks, and legs, but Armitage was no longer entirely present. All his life he had been taught to meditate on Christ’s sufferings, to identify with them fully, to experience them as his own. He was well trained, then, to adopt the experience of another, but now instead of imitating Christ who had, at least according to Scripture, taken no pleasure in his punishments, he imitated Kylo, welcoming the pain. It was the most sacrilegious thought he had ever had. He began to laugh.

*

Starving, aching, and chained to the floor, Armitage did not call upon God. He did not curse the heavens nor ask why this was his fate. Surely if there was a God -- the God of Scripture, and not Kylo’s strange dark force -- then Armitage well knew why he was being punished. His mind drifted far from the cold stone.

_Kylo had sent most of the monks to the market day in Beauvoir, and so the abbey was almost deserted, as he dragged Armitage into the church. The late afternoon sun slanted in through the high windows, sending the dust motes dancing. The somber statue of Christ, cloaked in shadows, gazed over the altar, which was draped in dark red silk for the feast of the abbey’s patron, Saint Ren. The mossy sweetness of wild roses, spilling from silver vases, mingled with the parched dust of ancient stone._

_“They say,” Kylo trailed his fingers over the garnet-encrusted reliquary that housed the saint’s bones, “that after his martyrdom, Saint Ren returned, rising from the grave with the first roses of summer.”_

_“What are you doing?” Armitage snapped, as Kylo pushed him against the altar. It dug into the back of his thighs as Kylo ground into him, and he would have protested but his mouth was full of Kylo’s tongue. He pushed him away. “Anyone could walk in and see us.”_

_“That’s half the fun.” He smirked. “Maybe Brother Dopheld is watching from the shadows.”_

_“God will strike us down.”_

_“Why? Is this ritual not sacred too?” He kissed along Armitage’s jaw. “Is the union of the flesh not divine? Does it not stand for the soul’s communion with God?”_

_“Kylo, stop.” He spoke with an inquisitor’s authority. “If we are going to do this, we will do it properly.”_

_He reversed their positions, backing Kylo’s up against the stone. “Strip and get up there,” he ordered, and Kylo hastened to obey, shucking his loose habit and sitting himself naked on the altar._

_Armitage kissed him firmly, and then pushed him down, knocking over vases and candelabra. He admired his lover, an alabaster martyr among the fallen petals, pale flesh scattered with scars and dark moles. He was an immaculate sacrifice indeed, a perfect offering. He righted a candelabrum and then struck flint against the steel firestone and lit the red tapered candles. The deep, honeyed scent of beeswax curled through the heavy air. He picked up one candle and held it aloft, considering his lover’s taste for pain. He hesitated, meeting Kylo’s eyes, seeking permission._

_“Please.”  Kylo whispered. “Please, my lord.”_

_Armitage held the candle high and tipped it so a little of the bright wax splattered over Kylo’s belly, like blood on snow. Kylo sucked in a sharp breath. Armitage dripped more wax across his abdominals and chest, admiring how it painted his body, like wounds, like scars. Kylo squeezed his eyes shut and threw his head back. His hands were clenched tight, holding the edge of the altar. “Please,” he begged, “Domine.”_

_He put down the candle and smeared the cooling wax across the broad torso with his fingertips, working his hands over the hard, sculptural flesh, marring it with the greasy residue. It was, almost too much and, suddenly, not nearly enough._

_He fumbled across the altar for the glass vial that contained the holy chrism. The bottle was heavy and round in his hand. Unstoppered, the consecrated oil smelled of wild grasses and pine.  He poured it sloppily over the fingers of his right hand and then worked them into Kylo, as Kylo had shown him. Kylo whined, writhing and attempting to push himself further onto those fingers._

_“Patience is a virtue, my knight,” he admonished, hiking up his own habit and stroking himself with the holy oil before sheathing himself deep in his lover’s body.  Kylo cried out, clenching around him, reaching for him with greedy hands, urging him on faster._

_Armitage grabbed at his wrists and forced them above his head, imprisoning them against the altar in a rough grip, continuing a steady, unrelenting pace. Kylo thrashed and moaned, wrapping his legs around his waist, drawing him in still deeper. The reliquary crashed to the ground, scattering ancient bones across the floor. Kylo’s eyes fluttered closed and his breathing became erratic._

_Armitage released his wrists, and cupped his face in his hands. “Dilecte mi,” he murmured, soothing Kylo with his voice. He slowed and Kylo opened his eyes, and for a moment, the whole world stilled around them. They were the eye of the storm. There was no altar, no church, no abbey, only Armitage and Kylo. This, thought Armitage, is what it feels like to be seraphim, spinning aloft on six fiery wings, sun-bright and pure, burning away the cracked and broken world. And Kylo spoke in his mind, his lips unmoving, “I know.”_

_And then, the storm broke over them, like a wave crashing, and Kylo was shouting Armitage’s name as he came, dragging him hopelessly with him. Wrecked and gasping for breath, they fell to earth among the broken vessels and ruined silk of the altar._

His mind returned slowly to the present -- to the cold, the hunger, and the pain -- yet the warmth of the memory stayed with him, a small flame kindled against the night. A smile curled his lips as he fell asleep on the hard stone floor.

 

*

A moth-pale sliver of a creature uncoiled itself from the shadows and stalked towards Armitage, shackled on the floor of the chamber. “I hope you understand how much easier you make our task,” Snoke cooed. “As you well know, the anticipation of torture is half the horror. So many heretics have no idea what to expect, but you, inquisitor, know precisely what you have to look forward to. Now, should we start with the pyramid or the pear? Both are appropriate punishments for a sodomite.” Armitage was familiar with both devices, but no, Snoke wouldn’t use them yet. The successful torturer built up to the more extreme and dangerous measures, giving himself more time to extract a confession.

 _Everyone breaks eventually_. That used to be Armitage’s mantra. Rend the body, and the mind will follow. Knowing how to push the body to breaking point without actually killing the victim – that was the subtle art. As an inquisitor, he had been a finely honed blade of Toledo steel, able to pluck the confession from the wrecked body as deftly as a fishmonger, with a flick of his knife, prised the translucent skeleton from the sea-pale flesh. Everything he knew about torture, Snoke had taught him.

The first days were not so excruciating that his mind blanked out with pain. He was still able to think. The damage was not yet permanent. This was part of the process – establish the fear of pain and disfigurement, but let the prisoner think he still had a chance to walk away. Later, the victim would not yearn for his previous life, but only death.

This was also the stage at which the inquisitor would bring in loved ones and make the victim watch as they were tortured, yet Snoke did not bring in Kylo. Armitage held fast to the shard of hope: Kylo was still free.

 _Everyone breaks_. It was merely a question of how long he could hold out. Could he wait long enough that Kylo would find him?

After they got tired of beating him, they bound his wrists behind his back, tied them to a ring suspended from the ceiling and then dropped him, dislocating both his shoulders. It was a crude ploy, but effective. After that he hardly noticed the beatings, because the damaged flesh of his back sang only with a sharp superficial pain compared to the deep sawing agony in his shoulders. _They are still sloshing brine over my back_ , he thought as the guards cleansed his wounds to prevent infection. _That means they still need me alive._

Later they placed his left foot in a bronze boot constructed to crush his toes. It was more painful than he had imagined. When they broke the fingers of his right hand, he thought, _I’ll never write again_ , lamenting the loss of his carefully cultivated minuscule script. He wondered how long before they started taking fingers. Soon he would be beyond caring, but the thought brought him no comfort. When they bound him to the rack again, he no longer had the strength to hold himself above the bed of spikes. He thought of the constellations of tiny wounds blooming all over his pale freckled skin, like a garden of bloody flowers sown in the dying earth.

Still, he refused to confess. _Everyone breaks_ , he heard the mantra in his mind. But _not yet_.

*

He found himself drifting away from the shattered house of bones. He was still aware of his body’s pain, but it was like a noise in an adjoining room. While his mouth screamed, his mind retreated inside. This was not the same as the ecstatic state he had found in imitating Kylo – he had left that behind days ago – but rather his mind splintering in two.

There were two Armitages in his head – past and present, Inquisitor and Prisoner. They were in a small stone room, the curved walls suggesting a tower.  The Inquisitor was dressed in a smart black tunic, breeches, and boots and he carried a riding crop. He looked more like a nobleman than a monk. He strutted the room’s perimeter, his sneering gaze never leaving the Prisoner, who was covered in rags and bound to a wooden chair in the center of the room.

“You used to do this,” the Inquisitor supplied, “and you were so very good at it.  The best inquisitor Snoke ever made.”

The Prisoner glared back through long greasy strands of hair. “They were heretics,” he countered. “No better than beasts. They had turned their back on God.”

“And what are you? Are you any better?”

“I am not a heretic.”

“You are a sodomite, and your lover is a witch. You deserve this as much as they did. You are no better than they were.”

“They were only peasants!”

“They were flesh and blood, and their pain was as real as yours.”

The Prisoner shook his head trying to block out Inquisitor’s words. “No!”

“Do you think only you are real?  You and your beloved knight and your precious cat?  Maybe Dopheld and Phasmos?  Are they real?  Or is the whole world a figment of your imagination?”

“They were real,” he conceded, “and I know that they suffered, but they were threatening the mother church. They had to be sacrificed for the good of the whole.”

“And what about you? Don’t you and your lover threaten the eternal souls of your congregation? Of all Christians everywhere? If you aren’t destroyed, won’t all the monks and priests take lovers now, break their vows, and flee the cloister walls? What will happen then? Will Mont-Saint-Ren crumble into the sea and take the whole of Christendom with it?”

“And what if people love whom they want to love?” The Prisoner spat back, furious at the Inquisitor’s manipulations. “Maybe it’s the faith that forbids love that is wrong.”

“So the Church is wrong? The mother church in whose service you inflicted so much pain?  What will happen to our vaunted eternal souls now? Are we all forfeit to the devil?” The Inquisitor smirked, secure in his argument.

“I don’t know!”

“Admit it, you enjoyed being me. It was never about anyone’s soul. You armoured yourself in the rhetoric of mercy, but you tortured them because you liked the power. You liked seeing people scream and beg and suffer before you.”

The Prisoner said nothing. The Inquisitor continued. “Do you remember that girl from Auxerre – what was she, 15 years old? She was a Waldensian – or perhaps she just met a Waldensian once, who knows? It hardly mattered, did it? As long as she burned bright enough to scare the rest of the vermin back into the shadows.”

“Shut up.”

“You do remember her, though: hair like late summer wheat, green eyes, crooked teeth, a little turned up nose. Do you remember how she screamed when you broke her fingers?” The Inquisitor rounded on him, bending down to breathe into the Prisoner’s face.

“I said, shut up!”

“A girl like that would never look at you – couldn’t look at you, since you’re a monk, but she got down on her knees and begged, offered you anything, _anything_ to let her go. How big did that make you feel? How powerful? And then how noble did you feel when you refused? Such virtue!” The Inquisitor spat at him. “And then her mother came and pleaded with you to let her go - her only child, the one love of her life. Do you remember the moment you refused her?  You saw the light die in her old eyes. And you told yourself that you had to steel yourself against mercy, that kindness is the enemy of justice, but you loved every moment. Their suffering didn’t matter, did it, because you are different from them, better.  They’re not real like you or like Kylo. Isn’t that right?”

The Prisoner, to his horror, had begun to cry. He never cried, and it came out in ugly wet choking sobs, tears streaming from his eyes, gluing his stringy hair to his face. “Stop,” he begged, “please stop.”

“ _You_ never stopped, did you?” The Inquisitor goaded him. “Just imagine if Snoke let you go – he won’t of course – but imagine. You would be the only inquisitor who had experienced both sides of an interrogation. You were a beautiful weapon before, but now you would be perfect. You would know precisely how to inflict pain, because you had experienced it. Or would it make you cry?  Have you lost your taste for blood?  Have you become a sniveling little boy hiding under his bed in the monastery?  Well, I won’t let you hide. Oh no, I’ve only just begun.

“That girl with the summer hair,” continued the Inquisitor, “was your first. Do you remember who comes next? I think you do. You have a wonderfully detailed memory, and of course you felt so alive, that every detail is etched into your mind. A farmer from Nantes, wasn’t it?” And so the Inquisitor continued, unspooling the thread in Armitage’s mind, a relentless parade of horror, of men and women, who had suffered as he did now.

He was aware that his tormentors were unbinding him and dragging him back to his cell. The pounding in his shoulders was a constant roar, interspersed by jagged sparks of pain every time he placed weight on his damaged foot. His body was strung out – so enervated from abuse and starvation – that he doubted he would survive much longer. Yet even as he collapsed onto the floor and closed his eyes, the theatre in his head continued spilling the details he had kept meticulously locked away – the evidence of the suffering he had caused. Men, women, children – curled up sobbing on the stone floor, he recalled them all – their anguish, their pleas, the righteous joy he took in refusing when they begged for mercy. Only now, he inhabited their shapes, his own wrecked flesh an echo of their dying forms. Now he knew the innermost way bodies broke and cracked. He had written a book on human skin and only now, with his body the last page, he could read it.

In the end, there were was only pain. Even the Inquisitor in his head was silenced. Only the Prisoner remained. He was merely a body, without a past or a future. He would have confessed, then, but he could not recall what he was supposed to say. There were no words in the shattered chalice of his skull. He would have prayed, but he could not imagine a god who would listen. There was a god once, he sometimes imagined, broken and bleeding, like this, but it brought him no comfort. He could not imagine why a god would choose such agony. He thought, _God is darkness, like Kylo says, beyond all understanding, and what does such a being care for pitiful human wretches?_ The only hope he had now was one word. _Kylo_. _Where was Kylo? Had he forgotten him? He said I was his only lord.  He would not abandon me. But then, I am a monster. I deserve no better._

Still, he held onto the name, like a talisman, imagining it as a perfectly smooth blue stone he cradled in one hand, curled against his chest. _Kylo_. And then even that one word fell from his cramped fingers, and there was no more thought, only pain.

*

“Wake up!” someone was whispering and shaking his arm. He pushed feebly at them, his shoulder aflame. A vaguely familiar face drifted into his blurred vision, but he couldn’t grasp its significance. “It’s me, Finnian,” hissed the man. _A monk_ , thought Armitage _, one of my monks_. But that wasn’t quite right, because he wasn’t an abbot and he wasn’t at the monastery was he? He was lying on a stone floor in a room that smelled like piss and shit, and anyway Finnian wasn’t a monk anymore.

It was so long since he had spoken, so long since he had even tried to shape words in his mind. “Traitor,” he rasped out.

“Could you be nice for once in your miserable life? Look it’s a long story, but I have a message from Kylo: tomorrow morning tell the guards you are ready to confess.”

Armitage shook his head. The room spun and a wave of nausea washed over him. He remembered his determination not to confess. _Everyone breaks, but not yet_. He opened his mouth to protest, but only a dry croak emerged.

Finnian lifted a bowl of brackish water to Armitage’s lips and supported his head while he drank. The simple kindness, so undeserved, nearly undid him and he felt his eyes watering. It seemed impossible that a human could touch another so gently.

“Why should I trust you? You’re a heretic.” For some reason that struck him as funny and he snorted.

“Because I’m hardly likely to be doing Snoke’s dirty work for him,” Finnian snapped, “and it’s not like being on the other side has worked out so well for you.”

Finnian had always been such a meek brother, but apparently he was just waiting for a chance to talk back to his abbot. Armitage’s mind was clouded from pain and hunger. This was probably a trap, but he could no longer think his way out of it.

“Look, tell the guards when they come to get you in the morning, all right?” Finnian squeezed his shoulder again.

“Mmmph,” he said, which might have meant _I’ll think about it_. The young man left and Armitage returned to dozing against the cool stone wall. The murmurs of the guards reached him.  As usual, there were three of them stationed outside his cell, as though he were an escape risk. He tried to tune out their conversation, when something caught his attention.

“All the milk’s bad?”

“All the milk in the city they say. And the wine’s turned to vinegar, and the fruit’s rotted on the trees.”

“That’s impossible,” the first man objected.

“The devil’s work, is what it is,” a third voice joined the conversation. “Reckon it’s because we’ve got this one penned up here. Sooner we finish him off the better, if you ask me.”

The other two grunted in agreement, but Armitage was unconcerned about their opinion. He knew what curdled milk, bitter wine, and spoiled fruit meant: Kylo was close, and he was _furious_.

*

Armitage blinked weakly against the early morning sun and stumbled as the guard holding his elbow dragged him roughly out into the light. He limped, favoring his good foot.  A crowd had gathered, jeering. “Murderer!” they shouted, “Pervert!” A woman spat in his face. Fruit pelted the ground around him. An orange hit the side of his face with an ugly squelch. It smelt of decay. He smiled.

“Come on,” said the guard,“we can’t keep the cardinal waiting.” He yanked Armitage in the direction of the courthouse, sending a white spasm of pain through his shoulders, but their stumbling progress was halted by the mob blocking the road. Most of the townspeople had fruit, but some of them were carrying the tools of their trade -- spades, rakes, hammers -- as makeshift weapons. Armitage was a monster and the people of Rouen wanted his blood -- they were not wrong, he thought with a grim satisfaction. The other guards encircled him. They had to protect him until he made his confession. 

There was a distant rumble of thunder, but the sky was clear -- curved and flat blue, like the inside of a robin’s egg. The crowd surrounded them, leaving them no escape. The thunder grew.

 _Kylo_ , he thought.

 _I’m here_.

Iron hooves on cobblestone, screaming, the tang of iron and blood, and seven horsemen, pitch-black, descended upon the crowd. Armitage watched with a detached wonder as they swooped in, swords drawn, cutting a swathe through the mob. The guard holding him was beheaded in a single stroke, his hot blood splashing Armitage’s face. There were bodies everywhere – not only guards, but also the townspeople –  and Armitage vaguely thought _I never wanted to see death again_. _I never wanted to bring death again_. The world blurred and spun, and he stumbled. Large hands encircled his hips and lifted him carefully onto the front of a saddle. He tangled the fingers of his good hand into the long black mane, silky and familiar.

“Upsilon,” he whispered, marveling at the softness.

“Fine way to greet your knight,” said a familiar voice.

Armitage sagged against him. He felt himself slipping away. Kylo tightened his left arm around him. “I can’t believe you’re still wearing my shirt,” he heard him say, before he lapsed into the blessed dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Synopsis: Armitage is imprisoned by Snoke at Rouen and tortured. Snoke, now a cardinal, tells him that he and Kylo have brought scandal on the First Order, and one must be sacrificed to redeem it. If Armitage denounces Kylo as a witch, Armitage will be saved and Kylo will be burned. Armitage deduces that Snoke has failed to capture Kylo, and he refuses to betray him. (Armitage wonders if he is being punished by God, and recalls a particularly sacrilegious occasion, in which he and Kylo defiled an altar.) The increasingly brutal punishments cause a psychological break and Armitage’s psyche splits, forcing him to confront his own past as an inquisitor. Finnian enters the prison and finds him broken and near death. He tells him to pretend that he is willing to confess. As Armitage is being taken from the dungeon to the court, Kylo and the Knights of Saint-Ren descend on Rouen to save him. 
> 
> fuchsmitbrezel made some amazing art for this story. See here http://fuchsmitbrezel.tumblr.com/post/149005564191 and here http://fuchsmitbrezel.tumblr.com/post/149667014281 and here http://fuchsmitbrezel.tumblr.com/post/149668299961


	9. I would bring you into my mother’s house

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rescued from Snoke’s clutches and hidden in the heretics’ fortress of Carcassonne, Armitage struggles to come to terms with his past. Kylo offers what comfort he can.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for depression, PTSD, brief suicidal ideation, recollection of past torture, and (as usual) burning at the stake.

**"I would lead you, and bring you into my mother’s house. Here she will teach me; I will give you a cup of spiced wine and the nectar of my pomegranates." ~ Song of Solomon, 8:2.**

A murder of crows, the Knights of Saint-Ren flew across the land, and the summer-gold wheat parted before them. Leaving behind the flatlands of the north, they bypassed Paris and followed the Loire river valley through Orleans, and then the Rhone as the rolling hills gave way to the hills and plateaus of the south. Crossing back and forth across running water to evade the hounds on their trail, they rode night and day. Sick with fever, Armitage snatched only brief glimpses from their journey: medicine women in the villages where they briefly stopped dressing his wounds and pouring concoctions of willow bark and poppy down his throat; fields of watchful sunflowers; the heady scent of lavender fields trampled beneath the horses’ hooves. One by one, the other knights fell away, heading in different directions to confuse the pursuit, until only Kylo, Upsilon, and Armitageremained.

Waking dreams and hallucinations pursued him as surely as Snoke. Long dark hands, like the evening shadows of hands, reached out from the grain to grab him, and the low-hanging limbs of trees tore at his hair. Stopped beside a stream for an hour’s rest, he looked at Upsilon, and bright ruby eyes returned his gaze from within a polished black skull. The infernal creature puffed clouds of sulfur softly from his nose, and ever after Armitage would think that in that moment he had seen the great stallion’s true nature.

Upsilon’s feet barely touched the ground, yet every movement jostled his broken body. But always there were strong arms around him and Kylo’s voice in his ear saying “stay with me, Armi, stay with me.”  
  
Days later, they finally made their way across the Aude plain, where a huge citadel rose before them. Its massive stone walls were punctuated by a forest of towers. Kylo spurred Upsilon on, and they galloped straight towards the main gate, the portcullis barely rising in time to give them entrance.

*

The next time he awoke, he was convulsing and clawing at the air. A pounding pain hammered his foot, sending rhythmic shocks up through his leg. A dozen screeching iron screws were being driven into his right hand, endlessly twisting, as they penetrated his flesh, flaying the muscle and shattering the delicate bones beneath. The fire in his shoulders was the dull roar of a banked furnace. A thousand points of light pierced his skin and his life-bright blood poured through them. He opened his mouth in the silent rictus of a scream.

From a great distance, a woman regarded him with the dour calm of a stone saint. Her lips pressed into a thin line.

“Please,” a voice whispered, deep and dark beside his head or perhaps within it, and the woman sighed. “Mother, please, this is beyond what I can do.”

She laid a small hand on his forehead and the night engulfed him.

*

He lingered for many days between life and death, slipping in and out of consciousness. His body was cocooned in warmth and the pillow beneath his cheek was smooth. Light seeped in lemon-pale through his crusted eyelids. Lazy thoughts lapped at his mind, like the gentle eventide licking at the foundations of Mont-Saint-Ren. He knew he must be bound and broken, chained to the floor beneath the cathedral in Rouen, his life leaking from the cracked marrow of his bones, but drifting through the twilit clouds of sleep, he welcomed the illusion. A face drifted into his vision. Dark eyes gazed into his own. He tried to lift a hand to graze his fingers one last time over the beloved features, but his fingers only twitched by his side. Then the soft waves of sleep pulled him under again, and he succumbed to their drowning depths.

*

He was in a bathtub or perhaps he was held in the ocean’s warm arms. The water lapped at him softly and he felt it brushing away the weeks of dirt and blood from his limbs. His eyes flickered open and he gasped as the water sluiced across his back, stinging the serrated flesh. “Hush,” the waves whispered, “you’re safe now.” He had grown up in his island citadel, encircled by the placid sea, the waves a constant lullaby.

“Why didn’t you protect me?” he asked the ocean, “why did you betray me?” He felt hands in his unkempt hair and imagined a dark-eyed merman, with a broad pale chest, untangling the knots and snarls.

“I never betrayed you,” he said as Armitage sank back into his embrace. “I have always been yours.”

*

  
“You should have died,” the stone saint spoke with the slightest hint of a smile. Despite her words, her voice was untinged by malice. “Still, I suppose you brought my son back to me.”

He tried to speak, but only a parched croak emerged. The woman held a cup to his lips. Cold water washed over his tongue, trickling down his throat and dribbling down his chin. He began coughing and his head swam. The world blurred before him.

*

He could hear the sound of distant conversation – musical, light-hearted chatter, alien to the silence of a monastery. It sounded like French or perhaps Castilian, but he could make out none of the words. The air smelled of baked earth. Although only a fine sheet covered his naked body, his skin was damp with sweat. He tried to move his left hand and it twitched feebly in response. A large, dry hand squeezed it.

“Armitage,” a low voice spoke, miles above him.

He cracked his eyes open instantly squeezed them shut against the shards of yellow light.

“Armi, come back to me.”

He opened his eyes more slowly this time, allowing them to adjust to the brightness. He was in a small, plain room. The walls were made of a reddish stone. White curtains, half drawn, fluttered in a light breeze.

“Kylo,” his voice sounded like a creaking pipe, rusted and dry. “Where…?”

“My mother’s castle, Carcassonne.”

He struggled to sit, scrabbling at the sheets and grasping at the empty air, trying to flee the prison of his bed.

“Shhhh.” With one gentle hand, Kylo pushed him back onto the mattress. “You’re safe here.”

“How?” he croaked, panic still thudding in his chest at the thought of being in the heart of the heretics’ stronghold.

“They know that if they harm you, I’ll kill every last one of them.” He smiled, the sun glinting on his crooked teeth.

Armitage sighed, but stopped struggling, burying himself in the sheets and curling on his side, away from Kylo.

“You came for me.” His voice was muffled by bedding.

“Did you doubt that I would?”

“You should have left me.”

“Why would I do that, _mi_ _amor_?” Kylo stroked soothing circles across his shoulders.

“I’m a monster,” he whispered as the grey hands of memory reached to drag him under.

“Aren’t we all?”

“Leave me.” Kylo stood and Armitage squinted up at him, a seraph annealed in the copper light. Kylo placed a kiss on his temple and then withdrew, leaving him alone in the dying day.

*

Kylo slipped around the door, hesitant to unfold himself from the shadows. Armitage found it hard to reconcile the uncertain man before him, dressed in a charcoal tunic and leggings, with the brutal knight who had washed the streets of Rouen in blood.

“I brought you some bread,” he offered, kneeling beside the bed. Armitage shook his head and closed his eyes. Kylo reached out to smooth the hair back from his clammy brow.

“Don’t touch me.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing. Go away.”

“I don’t want to,” he pouted, but Armitage had already sunk beneath the glassy surface of sleep.

*

_The ropes rubbed his wrists and ankles raw as he struggled against them. His eyes watered from the smoke and the first flames licked his ankles. He cried for help, but the crackling wood drowned his voice. Across the square, a thousand men stared back at him with cold grey-green eyes. “Think,” he told himself, “think,” but as the fire seared his skin, the blind animal clawing inside his chest broke free and he began to scream._

He woke into warm darkness, strong arms wrapped around him as Kylo mumbled nonsensical words of comfort. He lay perfectly still, trying to remember that he was safe with his knight, but he knew that was a lie. He was in the heart of the heretics’ citadel, surrounded by the very people he had persecuted. Even if they remained ignorant of his presence, Snoke would hunt him down. He would never be safe again, and he deserved no better. Every night these dreams came – sometimes he was tied to the rack, as the smiling cardinal tightened it until his joints snapped free. Other times he was standing beside the device as a heretic begged for mercy. Armitage showed none, but when he awoke, his face was wet with tears, and he sank his head into the pillow and prayed to the merciless darkness for oblivion. Now he curled in on himself, trying to make himself as small as possible, willing himself to disappear within the cage of Kylo’s arms.

*

“Ben tells me you won’t eat.” The small woman – Leia Trencavel, Countess of Toulouse –glared down at him with fierce, familiar eyes. Armitage raised one eyebrow. “Kylo,” she conceded, her lips pursed as though the name tasted sour on her tongue. He remained silent, watching the slow-spinning dust motes suspended in the heavy air. The days bled into each other, sluggish, hot and golden, and he floated upon their tide, silent and impassive. A week had passed and then another.

“You’ll starve to death, but perhaps that’s what you want.” Armitage shrugged one bony shoulder. “You think you deserve to die,” she continued, “and you’re not wrong, but surely if your god can forgive you, you can forgive yourself.”

“Why do you care?”

“If it was up to me, you would still be rotting in that cell, but Ben – Ben who had sworn he would never return to me – _begged_ me to help save you, and what could I do? You’ve never had a child. Poor thing, you barely even had a mother. You wouldn’t understand.”

He closed his eyes against her pity, willing her away. He felt the bed shift as she sat down beside him. For a long moment she was silent, and when she spoke again her voice was soft.

“Ben was a haunted child – we thought he was possessed and we sent him away.” She paused, turning the rings on her fingers, watching the fire deep within the polished cabochons. Armitage regarded her through slitted lids. “We were wrong,” she continued, “afraid of what we didn’t understand, like peasants running from a comet. Then, as now, he had such violence in his soul –they called him the Monster of Carcassonne. We couldn’t control him, nor could his uncle. Snoke offered him a twisted semblance of control, but he was only using him for his own evil ends. And now, somehow, you have tamed him and brought him back from that darkness.” She raised her eyes, pinning him with her gaze. “Without you, he will be lost again, a great storm in the wilderness, destroying everything in his path, crashing himself against the world, until he too is broken apart.”

She rose to leave. “You might not want to live with what you have done, but your death will not redeem you, it will only bring more pain.”

*

That evening, Kylo carried a bowl of porridge drizzled with honey into Armitage’s room.

“Help me sit up.” His voice was quiet from disuse, a handful of moths fluttering in his throat. Kylo’s face split into a lopsided grin as he set the bowl down on the side table, and hurried to help, wrapping his arms around Armitage's narrow shoulders. Kylo settled himself on the bed and offered him the gruel. The spoon clattered against the bowl in Armitage’s shaking hand, spattering the sheets as he tried to raise it to his mouth. His eyes watered at the humiliation.

“Let me help, _domine mi_.” Kylo took the spoon from him.

“I am no one’s lord now, yours least of all.”

“I have sworn to serve you in all things, and I will be strong for you, until you remember your own strength.”

“I will release you from your vow.”

“You cannot. Even death will not dissolve this bond.” He ladled a little of the gruel into Armitage's mouth. The warm, watery paste ran over his tongue, startling him with its sweetness. “And besides,” Kylo’s voice was gentle now, edged with humor, “I didn’t kill half the peasants in Rouen just so you could give up on me.” He wiped at his lips with his thumb before scooping another spoonful from the bowl.

He opened his mouth obediently, the fight going out of him. He ate another two spoonfuls and then shook his head. The porridge was a gelid lump in his belly.

After that, he ate a little more each day: porridge, thin soup, and fine white bread – the bread of aristocrats – washed down with the region’s dry red wine.

*

Armitage was surprised when Kylo arrived a week later with a linen tunic and breeches and insisted that he get dressed.

“I’m allowed to leave the room?” he stared suspiciously at the clothes. They were simple but finely woven.

“Of course. You’re not a prisoner.”

He swung his legs out of bed and sat staring at his pale, scarred thighs protruding from the nightshirt. Kylo helped, tugging the garment over his head and guiding his arms into the tunic, a deep forest green. He had a moment to be ashamed as his torso was bared to Kylo’s gaze. His body, always slender, was now emaciated, his chest sunken and his ribs protruding. Even more mortifying was his weakness, the way his legs shook as he tried to stand. His crushed foot buckled under his weight. His face was blazing by the time Kylo helped him up so he could fasten the black breeches around his waist.

“What’s wrong?”

He snorted in response, a short humorless bark of a laugh. “What isn’t? I hate being like this. I hate you seeing me like this.” He waved his hand, indicated his trembling body. “I’m so weak,” he spat.

“You’re the strongest person I know. You took took all Snoke gave you and you survived. You’re still here.”

Armitage looked away. “ _I’m not here_ ,” he wanted to say, “ _the man you loved is dead_ ,” but the words stuck in his throat.

“Come on,” Kylo kept an arm around Armitage's shoulders as he guided him out the door. They made slow progress, stopping every few minutes for Armitage to catch his breath. Kylo guided him down the hallway and out onto the ramparts.  
  
To the south, across the vineyards and patchwork fields, the Pyrenees rose in a jagged wall. The morning light glanced off their peaks, snow capped even in summer. Armitage, raised among the lowlands of northern France, had never seen a real mountain before, and he was lost in wonder. The fortress itself was almost as impressive as the mountain range. The crenelated stone walls were massive and punctuated by squat barbicans and towers topped with conical roofs. Snoke had complained that the heretics’ southern stronghold was impregnable, and Armitage could see why. He would feel safe within these walls, if he were not among the very heretics he had tried to destroy. The thought brought him rapidly back to himself. As if sensing the shift, Kylo tightened his arm around him.

“Come on,” he said, “a friend wants to see you.” They descended a long staircase that opened onto a small walled garden. There, standing among the rose bushes, was Upsilon. He lifted his head in acknowledgement and then resumed munching on the pink blossoms.

“I have told you, keep that impossible beast out of my garden,” Leia rushed in from another doorway, shooing at the horse. Upsilon, mouth full of petals, regarded her for a moment and then returned to chewing. Kylo began to laugh and, for the first time in months, Armitage felt a smile come unbidden to his lips.

“Ben, I’m warning you.”

“Yes, yes, I heard you.” Kylo took a deep breath and took hold of Upsilon’s halter, guiding him away from the roses. He paused to swing Armitage onto the horse’s back, and then led them through an arched gateway in the outer wall, and into a terraced pasture. Armitage leaned forward, burying his face in Upsilon’s mane. The horse seemed impossibly large, solid, and real. He smelled of sunshine and hay. He could feel the animal’s heart beating through his own body, slow and steady. He did not know how long he sat there, arms wrapped around Upsilon’s neck, thinking of nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to neon_bible for betaing and making suggestions that improved this a lot.  
> Carcassonne was the citadel of the Cathars (on whom the Church of the Force is roughly based) during the early thirteenth-century Albigensian crusades: http://www.creme-de-languedoc.com/_images/tourism/carcassonne/2.jpg (it only had the inner wall in the early thirteenth century – too bad, because Upsilon would have loved running around the grass moat).


	10. Comfort me with apples

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Armitage slowly recovers and a secret mission takes Kylo away from Carcassonne.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for depression, PTSD, brief suicidal ideation, recollection of past torture, death threats, food descriptions, and (of course) mentions of burning at the stake.

The summer ripened and swelled. The parched earth cracked and the grass shriveled beneath the sun’s unblinking gaze. Kylo’s knights returned to him one by one bringing news of the outside world: Pope Innocent lay on his death bed and the cardinals flocked around him like scarlet vultures waiting for his final breath. 

Kylo and the knights trained incessantly, honing their skills through long hours. All practiced riding, galloping over fields without reins or saddle, jumping logs and wading streams. Some mastered the broadsword, others the crossbow and the axe. Leia moved among them teaching them the rudiments of healing. Their strength in the force varied – Thanisson, the youngest and smallest of them, was the most force sensitive, and he spent long hours in meditation, guided by Kylo. Snoke had intended that there be a dozen knights of Ren – like the apostles – but Kylo had only recruited half that number before Armitage’s arrest. Nonetheless, they were a fearsome force, and wholeheartedly devoted to their master and, by extension, Armitage.  
  
Armitage liked to stand on the ramparts and watch. Their horses’ blue-black flanks gleamed, glossy as moonlit water, and the blades of their weapons glinted with murderous promise in the sharp southern light.

Every moment not spent In training, Kylo devoted to Armitage. He took him on longer walks around the ramparts, visiting the castle’s various walled gardens and terraced vineyards. Still they did not venture from the chateau into the town where Armitage's bright hair might give him away. For all that Leia, whom the heretics revered as a living saint, had reconciled herself to the inquisitor’s presence, he had no doubt that the mob below would tear him limb from limb.

Even with the expert attentions of Leia and Kylo, his healing was slow. The newly knitted bones of his broken foot and hand ached, and he still walked with a limp. He had been eating a little more, and each day Kylo brought different dishes to tempt him: white bread dipped in herbed olive oil; plump apricots; apples drizzled in honey.

For Kylo’s sake, he tried to content himself with this limited existence, but he needed a life shaped by purpose. Sometimes he yearned for some past version of himself who had acted with absolute if misguided certainty. Now he was a mere husk of a man, weighted to the earth only by the gravity of sins.

He tried to pray, but God, as always, remained silent. Before Kylo, before his own fall, Armitage had believed with an unshakeable faith in the things taught to him by the Church, but now, when he examined that inner part of his soul, there was only a hollow shape in his chest, a starless vacuum of space. At night, trying to find sleep within the screaming shell of his skull, he longed to hear the splash of waves against stone.

*

Kylo guided him through the alleys to his favorite walled garden. Here the interlocking limbs of twisted apple trees formed a bower, providing dappled shade from the high sun. With exaggerated care, the knight laid down the basket he was holding, and from it produced plates of olives, fruits, pastries, and sugared confections. Armitage’s eyes grew wide at the array of foods, so unfamiliar to a monk’s table.

Kylo blew the dust from the bottle of spiced claret and then uncorked it, sloshing a generous amount into their glasses. The wine was still cold from the cellars, so they set their tumblers in the sun to warm.

Kylo selected a fig and held it out.

“The historians say the empress Livia killed Augustus with a fig,” Armitage noted.

“Are you calling me your empress?” Kylo’s eyes sparkled.

Armitage bit into the fruit, feeling the slight resistance of the velvet skin giving way to the lush flesh within. A little of its syrup trickled from the corner of his mouth, and Kylo reached to wipe it away with his thumb. Their eyes met and Armitage froze.

Since his rescue, he had reluctantly allowed Kylo to help him with the necessities – walking, bathing, eating – but had rebuffed the knight’s gentle overtures. The only time he allowed himself to be held was at night when he woke, shaking from the nightmares. At all other times he turned away from even the most innocent acts of affection.

Kylo dropped his hand and his gaze. “Sorry,” he mumbled, looking away. “I know you don’t like being touched, but sometimes I forget and it’s as if my hand wants to touch you so much, it acts on its own. I’m so stupid.”

Armitage shook his head. He hated Kylo’s self-recriminations. He wanted to explain that Kylo, despite his past, was still something good and bright in the world, while he was dirty, defiled, and untouchable, his hands bloodied by sins no imagined god could absolve. Yet, he could not bear to speak the words; for all he knew that he did not deserve Kylo, he could not stand to lose him.

“Just give me a little time.”

“Of course.” Kylo’s voice was husky. “All the time you need.” He looked up then, a tentative hope in his expressive eyes. “Meanwhile, you _have_ to try these.” Kylo bit into a black cherry, and then rolled his eyes in exaggerated ecstasy as the dark juice drizzled down his chin. He spat the pit in Armitage’s direction.

“You’re revolting!”

Kylo laughed and flopped down on his back. Armitage lay beside him, careful of his bones. Blades of grass tickled the back of his neck. He squinted up at the sun shining through the leaves. Beside him, Kylo had his eyes closed, lashes long against his pale skin. The high branches shivered in a gust of wind and the dancing light painted his body with shadows. Armitage felt something tight-wound unfurl in his chest. He reached out a slow hand to brush Kylo’s fingers. Kylo’s eyes remained shut, but his lips curved in a small smile as he interlaced their fingers. They lay like that, dozing in the heat, as the sun grew heavy in the sky, and for the first time in months, Armitage felt a measure of peace.

*

  
After that, Kylo went out of his way to procure delicacies to share with him in the lazy summer afternoons. He charmed and inveigled the cooks to prepare platters of local specialties: fish marinated in ginger, pepper, cloves, and cinnamon or stewed with saffron and wild thyme sauce; chicken cooked in pomegranate juice and ground almonds; date compote; apple tart; white wine infused with sage.

“I’m getting fat,” Armitage would say, patting the small mound of his belly, and Kylo would laugh and feed him pieces of candied aniseed and ginger. It seemed to make Kylo happy at least, but sometimes Armitage would catch the knight watching him with a wistful expression.

*

Armitage was sitting in a chair by the window trying to read – some ridiculous story about separated lovers sending each other secret messages via a swan.

“I don’t know why you thought I’d like this tripe,” he greeted Kylo as he entered the room.

“I can get you something more scholarly,” Kylo smiled. “How about the works of Aquinas?”

“More fiction? Why bother.”

“Theology is fiction now?” Kylo teased gently. He did not reply.

“Listen,” Kylo swayed from foot to foot, “I’m going away for a few days.”

He looked up, a heavy cloak of panic settling over his shoulders. He tried again to focus on the codex in his lap. The morning light was sharp across the page.

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you yet. I don’t want you to worry.” He finally met his eyes. “My knights will be just outside the castle, and Finnian and Poe will take care of you.”

“Finnian and Poe!” he snapped. He knew that the runaway monk and the Spanish heretic had taken refuge in Carcassonne, but he had avoided seeing them so far. “They’re as likely to poison me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. They helped saved you. After I returned to Mont-Saint-Ren and found you missing, I was pretty upset. I might have destroyed a bit of your monastery.”

“It’s not my monastery.”

Kylo ignored him and continued. “Phasmos – he’s abbot now – told me that some of Snoke’s men had entered the abbey on official business and then arrested you. I figured that you would be in the dungeons at Rouen, but I had no way to get you out.”

“That’s when you came here and begged your mother for help.”

“Did she tell you that? Well, yes, I did, and as you can imagine she was none too happy about the idea of rescuing the First Order’s High Inquisitor.”

“I imagine.”

“But then Finnian spoke up and said he’d help. He knew that he could still pass as a monk of Saint-Ren and infiltrate Snoke’s stronghold on official business.”

“Why on earth would he do that?” Armitage was struck by the monk’s courage – or stupidity – in returning to the very heart of the First Order after finally escaping its grasp.

“Apparently he was close with Brother Dopheld, and he says you were good to him.”

Armitage recalled the occasion in the cloister garden when he had offered Dopheld the smallest scraps of human kindness. It felt like a lifetime ago. He wondered if Snoke’s thugs had trampled Dopheld’s garden beneath their boots as they carried him away. It had been raining that night, a soft insistent scotch mist. He pictured broken stalks and fallen petals pressed into the mud.  

“Armi…”

Armitage started, realizing that he had been drifting away. He often found himself unmoored from reality. His memories and his nightmares felt more real than his days in the tiny room. The creak of a door’s hinges, footsteps on the stone floors, summoned a tumble of images and sensations – blood, pain, metal, fear, don’t, don’t, don’t – that blotted out the world and left him strangling and choking for breath.

“Anyway,” Kylo continued, fixing Armitage with a concerned gaze, “it was Poe and Finnian who came up with the idea of getting you to promise a confession to get you out of the dungeon. I’m not much of a strategist, and I wasn’t exactly thinking straight.” His brows furrowed. “I just wanted to kill everyone.”

Armitage almost smiled at that, picturing Rouen as a ghost town visited only by ravens. “Do you have to go? As my liege, can’t I command you otherwise?”

Kylo knelt beside Armitage’s chair, taking his right hand. “As your man, aren’t I required to perform ridiculous feats of daring for you? I’m sure in this rubbish you read,” he indicated the open book, “the knight is forever going off on quests to prove his love to his lady.”

“Did you just call me your _lady_?”

“Certainly not, my _lord_ ,” Kylo kissed his hand. Armitage shivered and withdrew it from the knight’s grasp.

Kylo stood, looking hurt. “I’ll be back soon,” he announced, sweeping out the door.

The days stretched to a week and then two. Armitage knew that Kylo had taken only one of his knights – he could see the others training in the fields outside the city – and he could not help imagining the worst. Whatever foolish errand he had embarked on, no doubt Snoke’s men had captured him. Perhaps he was now imprisoned in Rouen – would the heretics’ spies know? He longed to ask Kylo’s mother, but he could not bring himself to do so, having caused her so much grief already.

Poe and Finnian proved surprisingly amenable company. Poe’s family and Kylo’s had known each other for centuries, and any grudges that Poe might have held against Armitage were outweighed by his delight in having his childhood friend returned from, as he put it, “the dark side.” Finnian, meanwhile, had worked out that Kylo had assisted in his escape from Mont-Saint-Ren, and he assumed that Armitage had also been complicit. To his shame, Armitage did not correct him. Finnian was kind, but his very presence served as a constant reproach. He had been raised in the First Order too, but whereas Armitage had absorbed its beliefs and sought to perpetuate them by any means necessary, the younger man had rebelled against its dogmatism and violence. He had escaped the First Order without any blood on his hands, and his calm acceptance of Armitage only worsened the latter’s guilt.

Whereas Kylo had always brought him food, his new caretakers insisted that he come to the hall for dinner. And so he found himself seated at the long table in the dining hall. Leia sat in the place of honor in the center. In the light of the flickering candelabrum, she looked both tired and regal. Leia Trencavel was, he knew the adopted daughter of the previous Count of Toulouse. The heretics, among many other strange beliefs, held that men and women were equal, and thus the count’s holdings had passed to his daughter.

The Countess was, as always, scrupulously polite toward him. Her tiny, fierce niece Rey was another matter. (“Her name means king,” Poe had whispered to him that first night, “and believe me, it fits.”) The young woman glared at him throughout each dinner, and Armitage was sure she would have impaled him on her sword, if not for her cousin’s stern instructions. He nibbled at the salted meat and drank too many glasses of wine.

Each morning he watched the knights training in the fields below the chateau. The leaves on the vines were turning red, purple, and brown. He felt like an animal skin secured to the parchment maker’s frame, scraped clean of flesh, and stretched to translucency. He thought of Kylo and wished he had kissed him goodbye, instead of pulling his hand away. The thought caused an acute ache in his chest. He wished he had told him, “it is not _you_ who is unworthy of affection.” He had felt, these past months at Carcassonne, that he was living in a limbo, sustained only by the Countess’s order that he live for Kylo’s sake. It was a small enough thing, too small to ever atone for his sins, yet it was all he had. Now as he became increasingly sure that Kylo would not return, he contemplated his own life. He was sure that Leia, true to her word, would keep him safe, but could he live out his life here, a virtual prisoner in a golden cage? He gazed down from the parapets, wondering if they were high enough to throw himself from. Lost in his own thoughts, he didn’t notice the footsteps until the young woman was standing beside him. ~~~~

“Lady Rey,” he nodded toward her.

“Inquisitor.” She scowled back. “They’re not high enough,” she jerked her head toward the ramparts. “You’d probably just be horribly maimed.” She smiled sharply, as though enjoying the prospect. “Besides which, he’s not dead. He’s coming back.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just know things. Like he does, like Leia. We heretics are all witches, you know.” She was baiting him, but at the same time she had provided him with what comfort she could, even if he could not believe it. He knew little about this woman – torn from her parents and raised by strangers in desperate poverty – but he saw that beneath her blazing anger, she was still filled with hope and goodness. She, too, was a reproach to him. Only Kylo, who was light and dark both, provided the ballast he needed. He leaned his head against the cool stone and tried not to think.

*

“Come on,” Leia admonished, pulling him by the arm. Around the great hall, people had taken up candelabra, censors, and cups.

“Where are we going?”

“To the cathedral to thank the saints for the rain.” The sky rumbled ominously as the first drops splashed against the windows.

“I can’t go out there,” he panicked, thinking of the streets that separated the chateau  from the cathedral.

“You can and you will – I have seen it in the Force.” She spoke severely as Poe draped him in a long hooded cloak, hiding his bright hair. He was trembling as Poe and Finnian propelled him through the passageways that led to the street.

  
“ _This_ ,” thought Armitage, “ _this is how I die_.” He realized that none of the countess’s promises of safety meant anything, because she was insane, deluded by her belief in the mystical Force.

He lowered his head, keeping his hood about him as he limped into the open. He scanned the street, hoping for some glimpse of the knights of Saint-Ren, but they were nowhere to be seen. The narrow streets were full of people dancing, laughing, and singing among the fat warm drops of rain that had come to save their crops. The mob formed a ragtag procession, falling in behind the countess as she walked slowly toward the cathedral. He observed their carefree joy as they spun about catching the rain in cups or outstretched hands, and he longed for the ordered stately rituals of Mont-Saint-Ren. What kind of god would delight in such chaos? All the people he could see had brown or black hair – being so far from the Celtic lands, there were no redheads at all. Did they know that Kylo had brought him here? Surely Snoke would have spread the rumor, if only to flush him out. Their pace was excruciatingly slow. At last they turned a sharp corner and the church sprang into view, a squat Romanesque basilica. Armitage breathed a sigh of relief. It would be dark inside.

The thunder rumbled, closer this time, and a sudden strong gust of wind blew through the square, sending him staggering. His hood fell back and he scrabbled to catch it, but it was too late. One of the townspeople was staring, pointing, and then another, and another, shouting in French and Occitan.

“It’s him!”

“The inquisitor.”

“Burn him”

“Why did you bring him here among us?”

“I knew he was here.”

“The monster brought him here.”

They were reaching for him, pushing themselves closer as Poe and Finnian tried to fend them off. Rey stood before him, sword drawn.

Leia stood by watching. The betrayal stung.

“Burn him.”

“Burn him.”

“Burn him.”

“Burn him.”

“Wait!” A voice broke through the crowd as a grey-haired man, stooped and dressed in tattered clothes, shuffled forward. He leaned heavily on his staff and fixed the inquisitor with sharp eyes.

“He killed my son. If any should judge him, I should.” He spoke in French, with a northern accent.

The crowd fell silent, shuffling forwards to listen. “Do you remember him? Fifteen years old, spoke with a stutter?”

Armitage nodded. It was true. He remembered all of them now. He could picture the boy – tall and thin with dark chestnut hair and wide brown eyes, a smattering of freckles across his nose – he recalled how quickly his adolescent defiance had turned to begging and then to inchoate sobbing. He had been raised among heretics, but had yielded no useful information about them. At the time, Armitage had been irritated that yet another useless peasant had wasted his time. Now he saw a young boy, a child really, broken like a green sapling snapped in two for nothing other than his belief in a different set of myths.

Armitage looked into the old man’s eyes. “Your son had a scar on his hand, right here,” he indicated the webbing between his left thumb and forefinger. He was brave. He cried for his mama and his papa before he died.” He felt the thick black poison welling up in his chest and choking his voice. He felt to his knees with a sickening crack on the slick paving stones and took the old peasant’s right hand, he bent his head and his wet hair fell across his eyes.

“Do you beg for your life, Inquisitor?” The man’s voice was shaking. “Do you beg me for forgiveness?”

He shook his head. He had seen how his life ended in his dreams. He felt a deep pang of regret that he would not see Kylo again, but he recognized the justice of his death. He would die at the hand of this peasant in return for the blood of one of his victims.

“My life is forfeit.” He spoke not to the crowd, but to the man before him, surely old enough to be his own father. “I accept your judgment.”

The man nodded. “Did you ever have a son?”

He shook his head.

“Have you ever loved someone more than life?”

Armitage nodded.

“And can you imagine what it would be like to have them torn from you, killed to satisfy the whims of some supposed man of God?”

He nodded again, thinking of Kylo rotting in the cardinal’s cell.

“Would you want to forgive them? What would you want?” The old man’s eyes were a blue fire.

“Revenge.”

The man nodded. “I’m too old and weak for it, so you will be my hands.”

“You wish me to take my own life?”

The old man shook his head. “You were never more than an implement of evil. I want you to kill the source. I want you to kill Snoke.”

“I will.” Armitage staggered to his feet and the crowd moved back. He cast his gaze over them, daring another to take up the chant, to threaten his life, but they were silent. Leia was smiling and Rey’s eyes had a wild gleam. He ignored them both and strode into the church and out of the rain.

*

Kylo swept into the room followed by Thanisson. The latter was covered in scratches, but Armitage barely spared him a glance as he sprang onto Kylo, pushing him against the wall and kissing him hard.

“Armi!” Kylo gasped, in the midst of the onslaught, “You’re feeling better? What happened?”

“Your mother tried to sacrifice me to the rain gods and the townspeople attempted to kill me,” he answered, wrestling Kylo’s cowl out of the way so he could attack his neck.

“Wait, hold on a minute,” Kylo, grinning, extricated himself from Armitage's arms. “Thanisson has something for you.” The young knight thrust a burlap sack in his direction before sprinting for the door. The sack wriggled and emitted a series of hissing, popping noises. Armitage placed it on the bed, hardly believing his eyes as a small ball of orange fur emerged, regarding the world with furious golden-green eyes.

“Millie,” he whispered. He had not dared hope that she might be alive, let alone that she would be returned to him. “You went to Mont-Saint-Ren?”

Kylo nodded, “I had to send Thanisson in to get her, since I’m a bit too recognizable. And he carried her back. By the way, Phasmos and Dopheld send their best wishes.”

Armitage tried to touch the cat’s head and she rewarded him with a sharp swat.

“She’s furious,” observed Kylo as Armitage nursed his wounded hand. She had begun to growl.

Armitage fixed him with a feral smile. “Aren’t we all?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you once again to neon_bible for the beta!
> 
> The historians Armitage mentions are Tacitus ( _Annals_ 1.5) and Dio Cassius ( _Roman History_ , 56.30.1-2).
> 
>    
> One cookbook survives from medieval Languedoc, the _Modus viaticorum preparandorum et salsa rum_ , discussed by Carole Lambert, in her essay “The South,” in Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe: A Book of Essays edited by Melitta Weiss Adamson (essay can be read for free on Google books).
> 
>    
> The work Armitage reads is _Milun_ by Marie de France.

**Author's Note:**

> Mont-Saint-Ren is based on the French monastery Mont-Saint-Michel.
> 
> The setting has elements of different centuries. The broader religious context implies the beginning of the thirteenth century, by which time the practice of infant oblation had already long died out. 
> 
> The quotation “eat of the fruit and your eyes shall be opened and you shall be as gods “ is from _Genesis_ 3:5.


End file.
